Ad buys do not guarantee anything and are truly only effective (unless you drop millions and brute force your way with an expert) when coupled with some other efforts on your part. I have a lot more to say on the matter but unfortunately I’m pretty busy at work. Suffice to say, don’t waste your money spending a few hundred dollars or even thousands of dollars on social media platforms that you and your game are not even present on.  if you are already on these platforms and have a presence/community following, then there are strategies available to you. But you can’t just walk onto TikTok and buy your way to the top without significant investment and connections. The kind that large corporations can do.

I would recommend getting involved on social media platforms that you think you can actually enjoy engaging in. Yes social media can be very toxic, but you don’t have to be, and a lot of people will flock to somebody who is just doing what they love and talking about it in an open, honest way. Start there, find your community, then build out ad buys and partnerships.

Getting streamers to play your game on their stream is probably one of the best.

I've found a couple though dev logs on YouTube. That is very time consuming, and the algorithm might still decide to not show you to anyone. But if they're good, you can get a large reach.

Guerilla style. Just never STFU about it on public spaces. Show it. Make a demo. If you're balzy, encourage some piracy of it. It might be annoying, but it works.

I find all my new indie games from splattercat on youtube. He does a new indie game every day, that or comes back to indie games that just had big updates. So personally I'd say youtube reviewers first then twitch

So, title question. I know I could try to throw money at Instagram, TikTok and Youtube (know your target audience),

Besides throwing money at a third party, you could just do it yourself. I don't really use TikTok anymore, but I used to see a lot of "Watch people program" style TikToks where developers show their game in progress, together with some explanation of something challenging they recently build.

If your game is cool, showing some "In progress" / "Making off" videos gets people excited about the game before it's release

But like you said, it depends on your target audience. Something like that would end up in the algorithm for "Programming TikTok".

From my personal consumer experience I would say twitch streams and steam demo fest are my two main sources of new games to "put a pin". And on twitch I mostly watch small channels (below 200 viewers), with couple of exceptions.

@ICastFist
I would treat every indie game as basically a lottery ticket. Keep making more fun games until you get lucky.