A look at TikTok's emerging meme culture, as multi-platform meme brands and independent Instagram meme influencers begin investing heavily in the platform
Bombarding a platform known for dance crazes and skits is strategic, and potentially very lucrative.
Context & Ripple Effects
For years the meme trade ran one way: screenshots of tweets went viral as Instagram memes because of that platform's image-first identity, and adolescents mostly encountered TikTok videos secondhand, as repurposed clips on curated YouTube channels and Instagram accounts. Instagram treated meme accounts as an asset worth managing — hiring a strategic partnerships manager for meme accounts after purging 142 of them in July 2019.
The shift reported here is that the suppliers themselves are moving: multi-platform meme brands and independent Instagram-native influencers are now investing heavily in TikTok, following the audience growth TikTok itself catalogued in its 2019 year-in-review. The middlemen who once stripped TikTok content for Instagram are becoming TikTok creators.
First-order effects
- Instagram meme influencers are splitting their output across TikTok, putting their existing audiences and formats onto a rival platform where they must rebuild reach from scratch.
- Instagram loses part of the meme-account supply it had just moved to court through its partnerships-manager hire, weakening the curated-repurposing pipeline that fed its users.
Second-order effects
- Instagram faces pressure to formalize creator support — partnerships roles, algorithmic favoring — to keep meme accounts from fully migrating, turning meme operators into a contested supplier class between the two platforms.
- TikTok gains a professionalized content layer beyond dance crazes and skits, which makes the platform more legible to advertisers and accelerates its pitch against Instagram for brand budgets.
Third-order effects
- If meme economics follow audiences platform-to-platform, cultural production consolidates around whichever feed offers the fastest distribution, and platforms begin competing less on features than on who owns the meme supply chain.
- The repurposing loop may invert structurally: instead of TikTok content flowing outward to image-first platforms, image-first meme formats get rebuilt natively for video feeds, eroding the distinct identities that made each platform a different meme venue.
The trend: Meme creation and distribution are migrating from image-first platforms like Instagram toward video-first recommendation feeds like TikTok, with professionalized meme operators following the audience.