Youtube VS TikTok VS Instagram – organic reach

Since this month I was going to join the Migratory May challenge on Instagram (which would make me post more frequently than usual), I thought it would be the perfect chance.

I also started sharing some of my needle felting creations on Nyel Design’s Instagram and am trying to grow that account after a long period of inactivity, so I was all the more interested in the results.

While looking at the data and conclusions drawn in this post, please keep in mind that they are focused on my personal experience as an artist with a small account. My numbers might be low, but I think they can potentially be a more realistic indicator for smaller or newer artists, compared to a lot of content I see around coming from big accounts.

I wish more small accounts would share their data and if you are one I encourage you to do so, as ultimately it can benefit us all.

WHAT’S THE BEST SOCIAL FOR ORGANIC REACH IN 2024 FOR SMALL ARTISTS ACCOUNTS?

Before diving in the comparison between YouTube, TikTok and Instagram in terms of reach and effort needed, let’s review the current situation.

Instagram

Artists everywhere are recently lamenting a steep decline in organic reach, especially on Instagram. I find this to be particularly true since Instagram made hashtag useless for small accounts by showing almost exclusively viral content in the hashtag pages and prioritizing that content even over newer posts, so e.g. you join an art challenge and when you check the hashtag you find yourself looking at 3 years old posts instead of the current entries.

Joining challenges is still one of the best ways for small accounts to get engagement on Instagram, but the results seems to be worse: compared to other bird art challenges I joined in the past with my illustration account (so we are talking more or less about the same audience), this one is having far less reach/engagement. An interesting point here is that my static posts in January were having higher engagement than the videos I am posting now in May, so it might not always be true that videos perform better, even though that seems to be the case overall for reach.

Instagram recently added some sort of gamified achievements and every time I log in it tells me that I am reaching more people thanks to my reels, or less people because I am posting less reels (guilt tripping, yeah!).

I am also seeing messages encouraging me to make longer (3 minutes) reels. I haven’t tried that yet, but we’ll see how that goes in the future.

What about YouTube and TikTok?

Both my YouTube channel and TikTok account are basically new as I started posting for the first time at the end of April. As such, I don’t have previous data to compare to, but as we’ll see in a moment both platform seem to push shorter (10 seconds) videos more than anything, which I expected from TikTok but not from YouTube.

It’s probably due to the fact that collectively people are scrolling away more than ever and platforms encourage this behaviour.

Anyway, let’s dive in!

30 SECONDS VIDEOS, AKA PROCREATE TIMELAPSES

I want to start with these because they are the lowest effort ones in terms of video editing. Procreate gives you 2 options to export timelapses: full video or 30 seconds. If you choose the second one, you get your short video ready to be shared on whatever platform. If you don’t have Procreate, you can use a different software that has a timelapse function (including free ones like Krita or Ibis Paint) or a screen recorder software like OBS on desktop, but you’ll have to edit the footage after to get a short video, so it requires a bit more effort.

I picked the best performing video on each platform, let’s see the results:

The best performing video on Instagram was the Tundra Swan with 155 plays and 88 account reached. The same video had only 7 views on YouTube and 636 views on TikTok.

The best performing video on YouTube was the Gold-crowned Sparrow with 139 views. The same video had 152 views (82 account reached) on Instagram and 638 views on TikTok.

The best performing video on TikTok was the Whimbrel with 702 views. the same video had 111 views (64 account reached) on Instagram and 8 views on YouTube.

Unfortunately, there’s no indication about the actual accounts reached in YouTube and TikTok, but you can see that TikTok had far more views.

Notice how Instagram has the most engagement in all 3 cases. This was partly expected because it is an Instagram challenge, the account is active and the people who commented/liked are mostly people I regularly interact with.

10 SECONDS AND 1 MINUTE VIDEOS

This comparison is less straightforward, but I tried to pick videos where I could at least directly compare 2 of the 3 platforms. The lack of equivalent data is because I usually don’t post longer videos on YouTube. They don’t get pushed at all, so I find they are not worth the extra time until I grow my channel more. I might go and post them anyway since I have them, but I’m in no hurry. I edited these ones in DaVinci Resolve and it took quite a while to go through the footage to select suitable clips from the handmade felting process. This may vary depending on what kind of video you post.

Let’s see the data:

The first 1 minute video I published on YouTube is the Brewer’s Blackbird and it only had 3 views, against the 407 views of the short version. The 10 second version had 665 views on TikTok (so more than Youtube) and 191 views (154 accounts reached) on Instagram.

The next video I chose is one where I also posted the longer version on TikTok. The 1 minute Western Tanager had 636 views on TikTok and a comment, which was nice, while the 10 seconds version had 706 views. The one minute Tanager on Instagram had 164 views and 131 accounts reached.

The last video is one where I posted both the short and long versions on all 3 platforms.

The 1 minute Purple Gallinule on YouTube had 440 views. I am not sure why this ended up being a short, while the Brewer’s Blackbird video was not. I think it influenced the views. The short version somehow got a whopping 5798 views! The 1 minute TikTok version had 217 views against the 678 views of the short version. The 1 minute Gallinule on Instagram had 144 views (131 accounts) against the 445 views of the short version (281 accounts).

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Own views

Both Instagram and TikTok should only count 1 playback from yourself, while Youtube counts up to 3 (I wonder if the views on the blackbird video were my own).

Audio

People are usually encouraged to use trending audio when posting videos. However, this may create copyright issues. As far as I know, business accounts have more limited access to songs for this reason, but creator accounts (usually recommended for artists and which I have) do not seem to have any restriction. There’s no way to filter commercially cleared songs, even though Meta has a sound collection library for this purpose. What I do is find a song I like in the library and then search for it in the app, which is time consuming and usually prevents me from using trending tracks (in the library there is a “most popular” filter, but not a “trending” one). On TikTok the audio I can access is pre-cleared, so the process is faster and I can sometimes find trending audio. YouTube also has a sound library, but you have to manually download and add the song to your video. I did it a couple of time, but then decided to just post clips without sound. As far as I know, videos with no audio are not directly penalized, but I am not sure if it affects the performance.

CONCLUSIONS

TikTok seems to consistently enable more views. The long purple gallinule video version is my lowest performing overall at 217, but most of all the other videos are above 500 and often 600. Since Instagram started pushing reels to chase TikTok’s success, I would expect at least the same level of exposure, which is absolutely not the case.

Short video fruition doesn’t really promote comments, but Instagram seems to have a little edge. This is quite dependent on your audience, if you already have a lot of active followers etc. However, I suspect that videos that get pushed to Facebook also get more comments because those users are more inclined to do so. Longer videos on YouTube (e.g. full-fledged tutorial) also seem to attract comments, but I don’t have direct experience with that. I guess it also depends on if people are using the app or the desktop version.

You also have to consider your target audience, as for example the users on TikTok are still quite skewed toward the younger demographic: 55.3% of my reached audience is 18-24. I wish Instagram would also give us insights into that, but it only seem to do it with followers, while TikTok has more granular data and separates followers, reached audience and engaged audience.

The main takeaway for me is to try and focus on creating content that can be repurposed on different platforms with the lowest effort possible, even if it might be less polished than you would like (e.g. no fancy audio on Youtube), and testing it on different platforms (e.g. I’ve always resisted TikTok, but it seems to be giving promising results).

Currently, 10 seconds videos seems to be particularly favoured, so I am considering to further shorten Procreate’s timelapses from 30 to 10 seconds.

In particular, it seems very valuable to create 10 seconds videos on YouTube, as they might get pushed to thousands of people (like the 5.7k views on my purple gallinule), but there are no clear criteria as for why it happens. I am also confused by the fact that the Brewer’s Blackbird and Purple Gallinule videos were the same length and format, but one was classified as video and one as short.

I hope this post was a useful read and would love to hear your own experience in the comments.