1. Introduction

This report tracks U.S. web search interest for three competing social media brands such as Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit. With the way all three platforms have performed over the last five years, I wanted to compare their search interest over time to see how they’ve competed for user Google searches through the social media industry.

Data is collected using the gtrendsR package, which queries Google Trends programmatically (Massicotte & Eddelbuettel, 2021).

2. Setup

library(gtrendsR)
library(tidyverse)
library(knitr)
trend_data <- gtrends(
  keyword = c("Instagram", "Tiktok", "Reddit"),
  geo     = "US",
  time    = "today+5-y"
)

ts_data <- trend_data$interest_over_time

ts_data <- ts_data %>%
  mutate(
    date = as.Date(date),
    hits = as.numeric(hits)
  )

kable(head(ts_data, 10), caption = "Sample of raw interest-over-time data")
Sample of raw interest-over-time data
date hits keyword geo time gprop category
2021-06-20 41 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-06-27 41 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-07-04 43 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-07-11 43 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-07-18 42 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-07-25 41 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-08-01 40 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-08-08 39 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-08-15 40 Instagram US today+5-y web 0
2021-08-22 38 Instagram US today+5-y web 0

3. Comparative Trend Lines

ggplot(ts_data, aes(x = date, y = hits, color = keyword)) +
  geom_line(linewidth = 0.9) +
  scale_color_manual(values = c("Instagram" = "#111111",
                                 "Tiktok" = "#0066CC",
                                 "Reddit" = "#C8102E")) +
  labs(
    title = "U.S. Google Search Interest: Instagram vs. TikTok vs. Reddit",
    subtitle = paste("Weekly data,", format(min(ts_data$date), "%b %Y"),
                      "–", format(max(ts_data$date), "%b %Y")),
    x = "Date",
    y = "Search Interest (0–100, relative to series peak)",
    color = "Brand",
    caption = "Source: Google Trends, retrieved via gtrendsR"
  ) +
  theme_minimal(base_size = 13) +
  theme(legend.position = "top",
        plot.title = element_text(face = "bold"))

4. Identifying the Peak

peak_table <- ts_data %>%
  group_by(keyword) %>%
  filter(hits == max(hits)) %>%
  distinct(keyword, .keep_all = TRUE) %>%
  select(Brand = keyword, `Peak Date` = date, `Peak Score` = hits) %>%
  arrange(desc(`Peak Score`))

kable(peak_table, caption = "Peak search interest by brand")
Peak search interest by brand
Brand Peak Date Peak Score
Reddit 2024-12-29 100
Tiktok 2025-01-19 93
Instagram 2021-10-03 66 
summary_table <- ts_data %>%
  group_by(keyword) %>%
  summarise(
    Average = round(mean(hits), 1),
    Median  = median(hits),
    Min     = min(hits),
    Max     = max(hits)
  ) %>%
  rename(Brand = keyword)

kable(summary_table, caption = "Five-year summary statistics by brand")
Five-year summary statistics by brand
Brand Average Median Min Max
Instagram 37.2 37 31 66
Reddit 74.3 78 44 100
Tiktok 19.4 18 15 93

5. Findings

5.1 Highest Peak

Out of the three social media platforms, Reddit has had the highest peak at 100.

5.2 Insights

After looking deeper into each line, there can be some explanations as to how each media platform has performed through this five year time span.

With Instagram, it has had a consistent performance with few rises over the years in search interest. Possible reasons for why searches are slightly lower than the other social media platforms could be that Instagram is an actual app so users may just go directly to the Instagram app rather than searching on Google to type in.

With Tiktok, we can see that it’s much lower than the other apps. Similar to Instagram’s case, Tiktok is more of an app so users don’t really look on google to go to Tiktok when they’re able to download the app to go to TiKTok directly. One noticeable spike was on early 2025 and this may be due to TikTok facing U.S political and regularity issues which included discussions of a temportary ban to the app. News coverage of TikTok potentially being banned may have had users looking up more info on this story leading to that dramtic search spike for TikTok.

With Reddit, we can see that it’s performed the highest out of the other apps. Some hypotheticals could be that Reddit can be a source to find a lot of information that users may want. This can range from product reviews, show recommendations and forums to discuss topics into. From personal experience, I’ve used Reddit a multitude of times from Google to search things such as “Specific Product Review Reddit” to get insights onto how other Reddit users reviewed that specific product. This kind of searching behavior may explain that pattern for Reddit’s strong search interest over time.

6. References

Google. (2024). Google Trends help: Understanding the data. https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4365533

Massicotte, P., & Eddelbuettel, D. (2021). gtrendsR: Perform and display Google Trends queries (R package version 1.5.1) [Computer software]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=gtrendsR