How do you tie a Windsor knot? What’s the best way to remove spilt candle wax? Can I claim on my ex-husband’s inheritance? For years many have turned to Google to ask questions. Now they are searching TikTok.

And, on an app often assumed to be the exclusive domain of Generation Z, many of those giving the answers are middle-aged “influencers” using their life experience to build substantial ­online followings.

Ann Russell, 60, describes herself as “that English cleaner lady” or a “very middle-class English old bag”. She ­imparts pearls of wisdom about cleaning (“never use an iron to remove wax”) to her 2.5 million followers and since receiving a cancer diagnosis has been talking about her treatment.

Russell, from the New Forest, joined the platform only to keep an eye on her niece and started posting during the pandemic. Now she has written two books and advertising deals have ­allowed her to take time off from her work as a cleaner to recover from ­ovarian and endometrial cancer.

Now she can buy Christmas presents for her children that cost closer to £100 rather than £15 or £20, can take a ­holiday or go out for a meal. She also takes on the trolls, posting a video in reply to a comment “you probably won’t make it until next Christmas”.

She believes her videos appeal to young people who have had less direct experience of cleaning. “The last couple of generations haven’t watched other people do it because our way of life has changed so drastically,” she said. “Most children of my generation and younger would have been at home with their mother. I was at home with my grandmother, and I would watch her cleaning things … it soaks in if you watch people doing things, like learning to cook.”

Posting about cancer was “an education thing”, she said. “The more people know, the better.”

Russell has been listed in TikTok’s end-of-year charts, as has Jeremy Beaumont, 60, who runs Rhodes Wood, a traditional tailor in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. Two years ago his son, Charles, suggested posting videos on the platform after stalled attempts on Instagram and Facebook.

“We did a video, ‘How to tie a Windsor knot’, which my father showed me at five years old, and it got a quarter of a million views in an hour. And by the time we left work it was well over a million. In the morning it was 3 million and currently it’s at 11.4 million,” he said. “It was like watching a slot machine. So we’ve not looked back. It’s been a huge impact on our business.”

The shop’s revenue is up 35 per cent at £1 million and he’s turned into a local celebrity. “People have stopped me in the street,” he said.

Another successful video has been “the gentleman square”, a yard square piece of silk with a hand-roll edge “that nobody makes any more because the silk mills don’t want to do it”. The shop has revived it and it has sold out twice.

Katy Howell, chief executive of Immediate Future, a social media marketing agency, said “there is a bit of a myth around TikTok being for teens and tweens and under-20s”. Fifty-two per cent of users are over the age of 30, in fact.

“You’ve had the millennials … these are the ‘perennials’,” she said. “They’re not retiring and putting on slippers. That behaviour has a very nice fit with the real core of TikTok, which is about crafting, doing things better, which is really why TikTok is becoming the search engine for many of the younger generation. In particular, middle-aged women are finding their voices. It’s about finding your tribe.”

One user firmly in that tribe is Awomancalledgeorge (“Lawyer, up­cycler, sober midlife veggie hipster”). She posts videos about subjects such as “At 48, am I too old for a pleather playsuit?” or “I found a benefit of perimenopause”, gaining nearly 500,000 likes.

Another listed on the #LearnonTikTok list is Tracey Moloney, with the handle The Legal Queen, a divorce lawyer from Chippenham who fields queries about prenups, ­custody battles and financial squabbles.

Sara McCorquodale, founder of the Corq influencer platform, said: “I think that the reason why people like this have cut through on TikTok is because they are seen as voices of reason and experience and expertise amongst a chaos of trends and perhaps videos that are more motivated by emotion.”