Twitter or TikTok: What will be the Platform of Preference to Make Super Bowl Comments?

Marketers are sceptical that TikTok will eventually dethrone Twitter as the go-to platform for real-time reactions to the nation's most widely watched events, such as the Super Bowl.

Twitter has traditionally been the industry standard for live, online conversations and reactions to events such as the Super Bowl, World Cup, and Grammy Awards. However, there has been turbulence since its acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk, opening the door for competitors.

To put this in perspective, Twitter hashtags around the 2022 Grammys received nearly 12.5 million mentions, according to data provided by Hootsuite to Digiday. In comparison, #Grammys2022 received 885 million TikTok views.

TikTok is competing fiercely for ad dollars ahead of Sunday's Super Bowl, offering incentives to advertisers in order to compete with Twitter and own the second screen for the Big Game.

According to Shaprio, Twitter's ailing ad business and dwindling user numbers (the app lost more than 10 million users between last year and this year, according to eMarketer) strike potential big gains for competitors like TikTok.

Advertisers have been placing their bets and advertising dollars on TikTok for about two years, using it as a growth channel in the hopes of going viral. TikTok's momentum has only grown as it has expanded its ad formats, personalization, and bidding strategies. The ability of the two to amplify a message is similar. That includes retweets, quote tweets, replies, and hashtags on Twitter. TikTok's equivalents are duets, hashtags, and stitches.

We are in an era where brands cannot ignore social media when it comes to building a successful digital marketing strategy. It invariably assists marketers in connecting with their target audience, increasing brand awareness, increasing sales, and driving website traffic.

TikTok and Twitter

With Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter has been facing uninterrupted turbulence and losing a devastating percentage of its active users. On the other hand, the short-form video app TikTok captures audience attention and even forces competitors such as Meta and Google to prioritise their approach to short-form videos. Despite the fact that the app is facing political challenges that threaten its very existence in key markets, its creative approach makes it appealing to both users and marketers.

Will brands switch over to TikTok for making Super Bowl comments?

Despite TikTok's growing popularity, we believe marketers will find it difficult to use the platform effectively during the big game. Why?

The key reason is that trending on Twitter happens instantly, unlike TikTok that takes time for posts to go viral. Besides, creating a TikTok video needs more time than writing a tweet. Especially for brands, it will take even longer as it has to go through an approval process from the related teams.

So, there is no doubt that marketers cannot consider TikTok as a replacement for Twitter during an event such as the Super Bowl.

But we believe brands can leverage the potentiality of a platform like TikTok both pre-game and post-game.

TikTok is a central hub of trending sounds and moments. So, if something notable happens during the game and results in organic content, then brands can make use of that opportunity and amplify their content's reach to more audiences.

In a nutshell, although TikTok has grown to be a competitor for Twitter, we believe TikTok will not replace Twitter for live event reactions-like the Super Bowl-and real-time engagement for marketers.

Despite the comparison, marketers should not think about TikTok vs Twitter. They should always think about how to smartly use these two platforms to get more bang for their buck.