TikTok is encouraging its users to spend more time watching content together.
In December, the video-sharing platform introduced Shared Feeds, a daily collection of 15 videos it thinks users who follow each other will enjoy watching together, and Shared Collections, a joint-access folder where users who follow one another can save videos.
Shared Collections is already available to everyone, but Shared Feeds will gradually be rolled out to more users ‘in the coming months’, according to TikTok.
The platform’s new features comes as more people are becoming conscious (and vocal) about the negative effects of spending too much time mindlessly scrolling in isolation. And whether or not Shared Feeds and Collections actually fulfil a user demand, they still serve to addresses the anti-doomscrolling fervour by making TikTok seem more like a social activity.
It’s a bonus, then, that research indicates fairly consistently that people tend to indulge more when they do things together — across a range of activities.
Food psychologist John de Castro, for example, demonstrated that people eat 44% more when dining with others compared to when alone (although he collected the data using food diaries, which can be unreliable).
Research has also shown gamers play for longer when they play together, while a 2011 study found that people tend to watch TV for longer, and switch channels less frequently, when watching with others*.
What’s more, watching TV with other people has been shown to be good for ad effectiveness, too. Speaking at an event last November, Thinkbox’s head of research, Anthony Jones, said 2024’s Context Affects study demonstrated that consuming ads with someone else resulted in a ‘23% uplift’ in viewers’ awareness of the product being advertised.
At the same event, Tapestry Research’s head of analytics, Tom Morgan, added that people who encountered an ad with others reported liking the ad 75% more than those who encountered it alone.
A study published in December complicates the above findings, however. The paper, by Mi Hyun Lee and Jaewon Royce Choi, found that while co-viewing with a human companion ‘positively influences attention to TV programs’, it ‘negatively affects attention to TV ads’.
It’s probably a bad omen for TikTok that this dynamic was more potent on CTV than linear — but co-viewing behaviours on digital video platforms is yet to be studied, so we can’t know for sure.
* The exception to this might be binge-watching series on streaming platforms, which people tend to do alone.
Main image by Mart Production
