Sustainability in TikTok after COVID-19. The viral influencers in Spanish and their micro-actions

Abstract

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda address climate issues and environmental degradation. Their communication has grown on social media in the wake of COVID-19, with climate awareness promoting change with in-home micro-actions. This research focuses on the tiktokers that publish in Spanish, with the hashtag #sostenibilidad, and which are the most important two years after the official declaration of the pandemic (11 March 2022). The fundamental hypothesis is that micro-actions, in these audio-visual pills or short videos, can be the beginning of a new way of raising environmental awareness in social networks. The methodology contains four correlative steps: search for hashtags, quantitative analysis in TikTok, search for the 10 most successful and engaged accounts, and their descriptive content analysis. The results show that the 10 most successful accounts are female and only 3 of these creators have more than 100,000 followers, although 6 of them have more than 1 million "Likes". They are young, get high engagement rates, higher than Instagram and Twitter, and prove that you can be an influencer without being on several social networks at the same time.