TikTok rising amongst social networking platforms, is now home to 1 Billion users

TikTok, a video sharing social networking application launched in September 2016 is now home to 1 Billion people. A massive community in which users are allowed to share videos of different genres ranging from dance, music, comedy, Food, Influential to education and business. TikTok was first launched in China and an year later it was available for the rest of the world. TikTok became one of the most popular social media applications in no time and it continued to surprise its users with mind blowing new features every year, which resulted in extreme growth of the application. One of which is the vertical full screen mode that provides graphically explicit videos and users tend to put more attention to the videos. Not only that, this feature inspired other applications as well including, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. The rapid growth of TikTok forced other social media platforms to update their applications.

On Monday TikTok announced the great accomplishment of whooping 1 Billion users per month through a blog post. Last year in July TikTok recorded 689 million active users and this year there was almost a 45% increase in users, more than any application has ever made. Even Facebook, who has over 2.9 Billion monthly active users only had an increase of 7% in a year.

And if we look from global population perspective one in every seven person uses the application, which means from boomers to millennials almost every person living on this planet knows at least something about it.

TikTok achieved more than a few milestones during the pandemic, it became the first non Facebook application to achieve 3 Billion downloads from all over the world, which increased the competition among the social networking applications and Instagram didn't hold back from coming up with innovative features to boost the application and recently declared that Instagram is not a photo sharing application anymore and started promoting Reels along with discussion forums like Reddit in the form of short videos. Instagram also suggested the users to recycle watermarked TikToks and post them on reels accordingly.

Even though TikTok has users from all around the world, a great amount of content is shared from the United States, Europe, Brazil and Southeast Asia as well. TikTok has also faced a number of threats from various countries and different authorities including the president of the United States, Donald Trump, who threatened to block U.S business transactions with TikTok. Not only that, India also banned TikTok last year and has not lifted the ban to date.

Even with all the difficult circumstances TikTok manifests rapid growth which is proved by the 1 Billion milestone they achieved recently and according to sources TikTok is planning to expand further alongside Pico, the VR hardware company.



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