How the Knox Index works

TikTok is becoming one of the most important channels for MPs to reach constituents.

Andy Burnham became the most successful politician in the UK this year by posting regularly on social media, particularly on TikTok, to reach his voters. And 273 MPs now have TikTok accounts. And every major political party posts regularly to engage with the country on issues that matter to voters.

But what content is the most engaging? What do people think about that content? What should MPs and political influencers do to maximise the impact of their content and scale out their work?

With the Knox Index, we can give people the answer.

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Why We Built the Knox Index

Political TikTok has been a black box. The data was fragmented, held almost entirely by TikTok and difficult to understand.  Whenever we needed to show insight or demonstrate what worked and what didn't, we had to look at desk research done on major brands or information from . It didn’t work, because persuading a voter is not the same as selling a product.

That meant that one of the most important social media channels was poorly understood for politics. Just as it was becoming perhaps the most important social platform for reaching new voters, we were struggling to find good anyone who had good data on how to use it.

We thought politicians, parties and the people who advise them deserved better. So we built it.

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How the Knox Index Works

The Knox Index has collected over 45,000 TikTok videos from 371 MPs, political organisations and senior influencers in the United Kingdom. We check our tracked accounts daily for more content, early in the morning, and feed that into our data processing workflows.

Using a bespoke in-house process combining machine learning technology with video analysis software, we watch, analyze, and score the performance of each video across a dozen ranking factors to evaluate the effectiveness of a video in delivering a political message. We do the same daily for each social account, and create a Knox Score: a bespoke evaluation of an accounts' overall performance.

This gets delivered online, with data updated multiple times per day to keep you informed as to which political figure has the most influence. Our free tool provides a huge amount of insight already, with deeper paid Knox Index integrations available to give bespoke insight that you can't get anywhere else.

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How to get the best insights from the Knox Index

One of the best ways to use the Knox Index for insights is to compare politicians on TikTok to see who is doing better, and why.

One of the first things we looked at back in July, for example, was how Andy Burnham was beating Keir Starmer on TikTok when people were umm-ing and ahh-ing about whether Starmer would resign and whether Burnham would become PM.

We saw that, even after the Makerfield by-election, Burnham was posting constantly. He made on average 17 TikToks per week since setting up his account, about six times more than his predecessor, Keir Starmer. And his content has been more polished with a scrappier team, even when mid-election, with nationally appealing content. And that led to a higher engagement rate and faster follower growth on his account. 

Before he became Prime Minister, he had almost 100,000 more followers than Keir Starmer and consistently more views. Excluding Starmer’s farewell address, Burnham had a 33% higher engagement rate (8.2% for Burnham versus 5.9% for Starmer) up to 19th July 2026. And since becoming Prime Minister, his growth has been stratospheric.

While other agencies and journalists were discovering his TikTok fame as late as early August, we were able to point out and document his successes from as early as June. That two months' lead time and Big Data insight from the Knox Index meant we were able to give insights nobody else could into his huge following, and use those insights before anyone else to help our clients globally shift opinion and command the narrative.

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Stay Informed with Knox Index Updates

The Knox Index was a tool we originally built to keep up to date with what MPs and political figures across the United Kingdom are doing to reach and persuade voters to back them. We didn't expect it, but we're also glad that MPs from both the Left and the Right find the Index useful too.

We are building out the tool even further, with a roadmap in place to expand the Index to include more politicians around the world, including to understand the upcoming US Midterms and global leaders' social media activity in general.

When you visit the Knox Index, you can sign up to be kept up to date with all the major insights each week on how political leaders are using the platform. But you can also sign up for product developments by our team on both the Index and other social listening and political strategy tools, to better understand how to convince voters to back you.

And while the Knox Index is very useful now, we're especially excited about how we can develop more to create more insights in 2027 and beyond.