TikTok and podcasts now lead Black Friday 2025 conversations. Discover why audio and video signals matter and how they reshape consumer behavior.
For years, Black Friday insights were built almost entirely on written conversations: tweets, comments, reviews, blogs and news mentions. But in 2025, this approach is no longer enough. The platforms shaping consumer perception, and ultimately driving purchase decisions, are no longer text-first spaces. They are audio-visual ecosystems, led by TikTok and podcasts, where emotion, authenticity and storytelling outperform any traditional format.
In the Black Friday 2025 study, TikTok appears with the highest share of attention across monitored channels, while podcasts show one of the fastest-growing participation rates, reflecting a fundamental shift in how people talk about products, brands and deals. Together, they signal a new era of influence: one where the most valuable consumer signals are expressed through tone, voice, narrative, reactions, humor and lived experience.
This article explores why these channels matter, why brands can’t ignore them, and why monitoring audio-visual spaces requires new methodologies that go far beyond traditional text scraping.
TikTok: The Center of Cultural Acceleration
TikTok is no longer just a social network; it is a cultural engine. Its short-form videos compress opinion, demonstration and emotion into seconds, creating conversations that are faster, louder and more honest than those captured in text.
On TikTok, Black Friday content moves through trends unboxings, hauls, “must-buy” lists, best review compilations, creator recommendations, budgeting hacks and authenticity-driven commentary. People don’t just write what they think; they show it. This makes TikTok a platform where sentiment becomes visual and immediate.
For 2025, the study shows that TikTok captures the largest share of attention during the Black Friday season, positioning it as the main platform where consumer expectations are shaped. Instead of reading about products, people watch them in real contexts: homes, routines, commutes, dorm rooms and workplaces. This gives brands access to signals that simply don’t exist in text form frustration in a facial expression, satisfaction in a reaction, or endorsement through habitual use.
TikTok also shifts influence away from traditional advertising. Micro-creators, reviewers, retail employees and everyday users now carry weight equal to or greater than major accounts. Consumer decisions become more grounded in lived experience than in brand messaging.
Podcasts: the slow influence that builds trust
If TikTok captures fast attention, podcasts capture deep attention. Inside the study, podcasts hold a significant share of the Black Friday conversation nearly 44% in monitored audio/video mentions, highlighting how buyers rely on long-form storytelling and expert voices to validate decisions.
Podcasts operate differently from social feeds. Listeners commit time, presence and trust, they aren’t scrolling; they’re engaging. Recommendations delivered in this environment feel personal, even intimate. When a host explains why a product works, how it fits into their life or what problem it solves, the influence carries emotional depth.
For Black Friday, podcasts reveal something essential: people seek context, not just deals. They want to understand value, durability, usability and relevance. These nuances rarely appear in short text posts but emerge naturally in conversations where tone, emphasis and narrative structure matter.
Podcasts also expose a layer of consumer logic that is invisible in text. People talk about budgeting, lifestyle adaptation, product longevity, frustrations and brand credibility in ways that sound more human and unfiltered.
Why monitoring these channels is different, and necessary
Traditional social listening tools were built for text. But TikTok and podcasts require a different intelligence infrastructure, one capable of interpreting:
- Voice tone
- Pace and emphasis
- Reactions and emotional cues
- Real-world demonstrations
- Narrative sequencing
- Contextual meaning beyond keywords
You cannot capture these through keyword matching alone. This is why the Black Friday 2025 study integrates audio and video analysis, enabling the detection of patterns that live outside written conversation. On these platforms, content becomes multidimensional: gestures, pauses, reactions and environment shape meaning as much as words.
Monitoring these channels also expands early detection power. Trends often appear on TikTok weeks before reaching news outlets or written discussions. Podcasts, on the other hand, expose friction points doubts, hesitations, expectations long before consumers articulate them publicly.
Together, they offer a 360-degree view of the consumer mindset.
The Rise of Multi-Format Influence
TikTok and podcasts are not just new channels; they represent new formats of influence. In 2025:
- People trust creators more than official ads
- Product reviews feel more credible when demonstrated
- Decision-making begins in entertainment spaces
- Audio and video shape emotion more strongly than text
- Influence happens before people think they are being influenced
This means brands need to monitor not only what is being said, but how it is being expressed. The faster this shift spreads, the more critical it becomes to integrate these channels into any serious intelligence framework.
Insights
Black Friday 2025 makes one thing clear: the real conversation is no longer happening in written threads. It’s happening in voices and videos in reactions, expressions, stories and authentic moments captured on TikTok and podcasts.
Brands that fail to monitor these spaces will miss the strongest signals of the season. Brands that do will not only understand what consumers want, but why they want it long before the discount season begins.
Download the free report now: Black Friday 2025
