A fast-food chain in Almaty with over a million followers. A honey producer in East Kazakhstan finding export customers through beekeeping videos. A Shymkent clothing brand adding 15,000 followers and roughly 20% more sales in a year. Kazakhstan's small businesses have turned TikTok into a serious sales channel — and for travellers, that means the country's cafes, tour operators and local brands are easier to discover than ever.

The numbers come from the second annual "TikTok Effect" study, a joint survey by TikTok and the Atameken National Chamber of Entrepreneurs, presented at the TikTok Impact Forum in Almaty on October 28. Researchers polled 206 companies across all 20 regions of Kazakhstan between September and October, spanning seven sectors including culture, entertainment and tourism; catering; and food products.

The headline finding: more than 70% of surveyed businesses now use TikTok for work at least monthly, and 88.3% said the platform helped them attract new customers. Nearly 58% attributed more than 5% of their revenue to TikTok activity — up 12 percentage points on the previous survey — and for 14.6% of companies, the platform accounted for at least a quarter of total income.

Travel-adjacent sectors are among the biggest movers. Tourism, culture and entertainment businesses attributing at least 5% of revenue to TikTok jumped nearly 25 percentage points to 60.5%. Catering stayed near the top at 68%. Real estate saw the sharpest rise of all, up more than 40 points to 66.6%. Researchers modelling the platform's economic footprint estimate TikTok-linked revenue at anywhere from 531.6 billion to 1.06 trillion tenge in 2026 — between 0.33% and 0.67% of national GDP, depending on how many entrepreneurs use it actively.

What does this mean if you're actually visiting Kazakhstan? Practically, it means your discovery tools have changed. The Almaty burger chain profiled in the study says customers now travel from other cities after seeing its videos, and a single hour-long livestream pulls in 15-20 inquiries and three to six sales. Organic content dominates — 77.6% of businesses post videos rather than rely on ads — so what you see on TikTok about a Kazakh restaurant, guesthouse or tour is usually made by the owner, not an agency. That's a genuinely useful filter when picking where to eat in Almaty or which honey stall to seek out.

The platform isn't slowing down, either. TikTok for Business launched in Kazakhstan in 2021, a startup academy with Astana Hub followed in 2022, and a 2024 "Made in Kazakhstan" competition drew more than 800 small enterprises. Both TikTok and Atameken say they want to deepen the partnership.

Caveats apply — the researchers themselves note the sample isn't statistically representative of all Kazakh SMEs, and the GDP figures are model-based estimates. But the direction is clear: Kazakhstan's local businesses are getting very good at showing themselves off in short video. For visitors, scrolling before a trip to Almaty, Shymkent or the east of the country is no longer just entertainment — it's research.

Story reported by The Astana Times.