Love Island is back for its 12th series – and it’s not just the villa that’s had an upgrade.

After falling audience figures in recent years, the number of us tuning in is returning to series eight levels – the year that delivered Love Island icons like Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu, Indiyah Polack and Tasha Ghouri.

But if daily episodes are our type on paper, social media is the bombshell that’s turning heads.

Figures from ITV shared with BBC Newsbeat suggest the series’ growth on socials is outstripping the success it’s having on TV.

Analysis by the BBC found that Love Island’s official accounts had gained 1.8m followers since the start of 2025, with 1m of those on TikTok.

Ex-islander Diamanté Laiv tells BBC Newsbeat the short-form updates are much more appealing than committing to the nightly TV show.

“I’m a very busy person, so I don’t really have the time to sit down every day for an hour and just watch people kiss,” she says.

Diamanté, who appeared in series 11, says she’s not surprised millions are keeping up to date on their phone.

“It’s more popular online because everybody’s online, it’s easily accessible. Every 10 scrolls on TikTok is something Love Island-related, so you can’t really avoid it.”

She’s not alone in staying away from streaming the episodes in full.

While the first episode of series 12 was watched by 2.6m people – almost double 2023’s low of 1.3m – the numbers are still a long way off Love Island’s 2019 heyday, when 6m of us tuned in to see Amber Gill and Greg O Shea voted most popular couple.

But that’s still a fraction of the 13m following various official accounts online.

On TikTok there’s been an explosion in Love Island content – with view counts for individual clips outstripping viewing figures for whole episodes.

Dramatic or funny moments from the show proper tend to perform well, but reactions, analysis, and debriefs – where content creators recap whole episodes in a few minutes – also notch up big numbers.

According to data gathered by the BBC there have been more than 87,000 TikTok uploads with a Love Island or Love Island UK hashtag so far in 2025.

For the whole of 2024, the same data suggests that figure was just below 40,000.

Anthony, better known as “giletslays”, is one of many content creators who have been feeding that growth.

He’s been making videos about the latest series for his 170,000 followers, and some of his Love Island takes have had millions of views.

Anthony says the real draw of Love Island has always been the discourse on social media.

But to take part you need to be up to date, and a nightly show can feel like too much of a long-term commitment for some.

“Sometimes if people miss a couple of episodes they feel they’re too far behind to catch up,” says Anthony.

Super-fan Harriet Fisher, who’s been watching Love Island since series one, agrees TikTok has become the go-to place for updates.

She says the US version of the show, which has overlapped with the UK edition this year, is “popping off” on the app, and believes this has boosted interest in Love Island overall.

“The way that people are engaging with reality TV and Love Island in general is obviously changing,” she says.

“It needs TikTok and social media to survive, to gain viewers.

“It shows that viewers of old can stay engaged, but also get those new viewers in.”

But those new viewers are forming a very different relationship with the contestants, Diamanté warns.

Traditionally, audiences have spent whole series getting to know islanders over one-hour episodes.

Even then, contestants have never been shy about blaming selective editing for making them look bad.

But on social media, with character arcs compressed into bite-sized clips, Diamanté worries fans aren’t getting the full picture.

“Conversations are being pulled and tweaked so I feel like it makes it even more orchestrated,” she says. “It kind of takes the reality out of the reality TV.”

Grace Henry, Cosmopolitan’s acting entertainment and lifestyle director, agrees that watching the show via social media fundamentally changes the experience.

“We have to be mindful that these are short clips and clips can be taken out of context,” she says.

“We’re never going to see the full picture of how someone is and things change very quickly in there.”

But Grace thinks online notoriety could work in aspiring reality stars’ favour – even if it means audiences spend less time with them.

She singles out Yasmin Pettet, nicknamed YasGPT online, as one islander who’s been able to connect with audiences this year.

Videos of Yas giving posture lessons have been viewed more than a million times on TikTok and gained tens of thousands of likes on Instagram.

“We will still have those people and we will have a connection to them, but they will just come around differently,” says Grace.

“It will be based on viral moments and whether they do something big that becomes a meme or a social media moment.”

Diamanté agrees and thinks social clips might even be a better way to build a following than being popular on the series.

As well as reaching more people, she says “more brands are seeing it and that’s the aim of the game”.

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