Metricool Releases 2024 TikTok Benchmark Study: Videos Versus Images and Carousels Analysis for Social Media Campaign Planning

The study analyzes TikTok’s content formats over the past year, unveiling performance metrics across professional and personal accounts to help marketers create and execute data-driven social strategies for 2025

Metricool, a social media management platform, published its third annual TikTok Benchmark Study. The 2024 study highlights data on TikTok’s popular content format Videos, and compares it with Images and Carousels, uncovering which formats perform best in views, engagement, interactions, and more.

Metricool monitored both professional (brands, influencers and businesses) and personal (average users) accounts to gather key performance insights to help social media managers, marketers and creators make informed decisions by comparing account sizes, posting frequency and identifying areas of improvement in planning for social campaigns. Key findings include:

Longer the Video, Higher the Views and Interactions

• Metricool’s data reveals videos between 2-5 minutes receive the highest average views at 50,000 whereas 1-2 minute videos come in second with just over 40,000.
• TikTok accounts with more than 50,000 followers obtain the highest average views with 5-10 minute videos.
• Video content receives more user participation, almost 60% more than images and video interactions. With an average weekly posting frequency of 2.62, personal accounts prefer videos over images and carousels, which are barely shared once a week, on average.
• Most notably, smaller accounts gain the highest impression percentage from the ‘For You’ feed for videos. This shows that TikTok’s algorithm gives any content equal opportunity to go viral regardless of followers.

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Images and Carousels Win the Engagement Battle

• Even though videos earn more interactions alone, surprisingly, images and carousels surpass videos’ engagement ratio by more than 25%. Despite reaching a smaller audience, that audience tends to be more engaged with the content and the views-to-interactions ratio is higher.
• The ‘For You’ feed drives impressions, capturing 74% of the total, towering the ‘Following’ feed. However, ‘ Personal Profile’ and Search’ traffic sources compete with the ‘Following’ feed as a secondary traffic source to earn impressions.
• ‘Likes’ is the most used interaction by users for images and carousels on TikTok, with an average of more than 400 ‘likes’ per post. ‘Shares’ come next, more than doubling the average number of comments. When comparing account types, professional accounts receive more comments than personal accounts, on average. Overall, users prefer to share content than leave a comment.

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Best Time to Post

• TikTok Videos: While active times on TikTok are sporadic, the user base leans toward late-night, or early-morning, scrolls, especially from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. Personal accounts achieve the highest views on Fridays, while professionals can reach more views on Tuesdays. Wednesdays also garner significant views for both personal and professional accounts.
• TikTok Images and Carousels: While Images and Carousels still capture late-night views for personal accounts, professional accounts receive the highest views from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with 7 p.m. also a popular time. Posting on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday reaps the highest views for this content.

“TikTok is one of the most used platforms by Gen Z and Millennials, and we look forward to compiling our yearly reports to identify industry trends and insights that could help social media managers and marketers be more strategic in their campaigns, “said Juan Pablo Tejela, CEO and Co-Founder of Metricool. “Videos are the preferred format on TikTok but we’ve seen Images and Carousels climbing up in popularity from user engagement, especially in the past year. As we head into 2025, we anticipate brands and influencers to use all formats TikTok has to offer to post a variety of content and reach their goals.”