Best Social Media 2022

It had been a few years since this list of the best social media for fashion consumers was last published. The reason for the gap is that the landscape of social media was relatively unchanged - until it wasn't. Although TikTok had been popular for a few years, 2022 was the year to highlight this important social media trend, and it headlines this guide for consumers and fashion influencers.

TikTok, known in China as Douyin, is a video-focused social networking service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts a variety of short-form user videos, and its rise rearranged how fashion trends start: a style can now move from a bedroom video to a retailer's rail without passing through a magazine at all. The rest of this guide covers the platform's history, why its algorithm matters to fashion, and the other platforms that complete the 2022 list.

TikTok: From Douyin to Two Billion Downloads

TikTok is an international version of Douyin, which was originally released in the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018. As of October 2020, TikTok had surpassed over 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide, and Cloudflare ranked TikTok as the most popular website of 2021 - a video app outranking every search engine and store on the web.

Those numbers explain the headline spot. The cross-year best social media collection holds the earlier lists, and the contrast is the story: previous editions could treat the platform order as settled, while the 2022 edition exists because one platform changed what every other platform had to do - short vertical video became the default fashion format everywhere.

Why the Algorithm Matters to Fashion

TikTok has provided a platform for users to create content not only for fun, but also for money. As the platform grew significantly, it allowed companies to advertise and rapidly reach their intended demographic through influencer marketing. The platform's AI algorithm also contributes to that influencer marketing potential, as it picks out content according to the user's preference - which is helpful for influencers as well as for consumers interested in fashion, because a viewer who watches dress videos is shown more dress videos, and a trend can compound in days.

Many viewers flock to TikTok to learn about fashion trends, beauty tips and celebrity style watching. A variety of trends have risen within TikTok, including memes, lip-synced songs and comedy videos. Duets - a feature that allows users to add their own video to an existing video with the original content's audio - have sparked many of these trends, and in fashion the Duet and its cousins became a fitting-room format: try the look, answer the look, restyle the look. Readers building an audience can follow the linked guide to get more follows on social media, and the terminology section defines fashion industry social media for trade readers.

The Other Platforms of 2022

Three further resources join the list of top social media platforms for 2022: Telegram, Discord and Twitch. Telegram brings channel-style broadcasting to fashion communities, Discord hosts the servers where sneaker, vintage and fan communities organize, and Twitch carries live shopping and styling streams to an audience raised on gaming video. None of the three began as a fashion platform, which is exactly why their arrival on this list matters - fashion conversation in 2022 happened wherever audiences gathered, not only where fashion media pointed.

The other top contenders are the usual suspects: YouTube for long-form hauls, reviews and runway film; Instagram for the styled photograph and the boutique storefront; Facebook for groups and marketplace selling; Pinterest for outfit planning and boards; Twitter for fashion commentary at news speed; Snapchat for ephemeral looks; Reddit for unfiltered product discussion; and Tumblr, the image-blogging veteran whose aesthetic archives still seed trends years later. Each serves fashion differently, and a consumer following several of them sees a trend at several ages at once.

A Historical Record of the 2022 Platforms

This page is kept as a historical record of the 2022 social landscape. Rankings, features and even platform names have shifted since - download counts have grown, apps have rebranded, and new formats have arrived - so treat the download figures and the Cloudflare ranking as the 2022 facts they are, and check each platform for its current form.

What has not changed is the division of labor this guide describes: one fast video platform to surface a trend, image platforms to style it, community platforms to argue about it, and publications to name it. Learn more about consumer fashion across the consumer section, where the reading and shopping guides for 2022 sit alongside this one. Thank you for using the Apparel Search website.