If you haven’t heard about TikTok yet, this is the time to get familiar with it. TikTok is the newest social media platform to provide content, entertainment, and engagement amongst Generation Z, Millennials, and Generation X. The platform supports only a video format of 15 to 60 seconds to capture users’ short attention span.
TikTok is winning on social media platforms because it is easy to use, extremely creative, and has a friendly user algorithm. All of these combined are a surefire recipe for taking over our dear friends’ Instagram and Facebook.
The beauty of TikTok is that anyone can open an account and immediately start creating content and gain attention from the users. To make it easy, this is how the Tik Tok algorithm works:
- You create and upload your video
- Tik Tok shows your video to a small audience that they think will like your video. That video is being shown on the For You page (more about the Tik Tok vocabulary and use below) alongside already popular videos.
- When your video is in that first stage of showing, Tik Tok looks at how many likes, comments, downloads, and shares your video gets. Currently, available info suggests that 1 in every 10 views that your video gets pushes Tik Tok to show your video to more people.
- The main trigger for TikTok’s algorithm is the growth of engagement it receives. For instance, if you upload a video today and Tik Tok sees that your likes in one day went up dramatically then they will continue pushing your video to more people.
As of right now, TikTok’s algorithm is fairly simple to understand and is easy to build upon, which could suggest why many creators, business owners, and people are turning their attention to TikTok, as so, should you.
In this post, I will be touching on the TikTok potential for your business, the fundamentals of Tik Tok, and how to start testing and building a strategy.
The Potential Of TikTok For Your Business
To get things started, it is important to understand what value TikTok can bring to you. The following statistics have been provided by Oberlo .
- There are currently 500 million worldwide Tik Tok users and growing.
- TikTok has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times in the app store and Google play
- 41% of uses are ages 16-24
- People on average spend 52 minutes per day on TikTok
- 90% of all TikTok users use the app multiple times a day on a daily basis
- 68% of TikTok users watch someone else’s video and 55 % upload their own content
- In less than 18 months (2019) the number of US adults TikTok users went up by 5.5 times.
- More than 1 billion videos are viewed every day in the last year
As you can see, the numbers don’t lie. TikTok is growing and is here to stay. This data is based on 2019, you can only imagine the growth it will be experiencing this year. The potential of growth for your business on TikTok could be remarkable as long as you get started now.
It’s also important to get started soon and not wait until you see others’ success on the app. The reason being is that the way the algorithm works and people’s excitement about the app is growing to its peak and could be of great benefit for you.
Getting familiar with TikTok and producing your content could potentially lead to a lot of business growth and be used as a great marketing strategy for your brand.
The Fundamentals of TikTok
Tik Tok allows short 15-60 seconds videos.
The video content posted to TikTok is vast and diverse. You can find anything from DIY’s, dancers, cute dogs to mom tips and political agendas. TikTok found a way to fed people with an endless amount of content based on your trending interest. Meaning, when you’re on the page looking at content TikTok caters specific videos to you based on the ones you liked and the common re-appearing hashtag.
For instance, if most of the videos you’re liking have puppies and dogs in them you will see that a lot of the videos that TikTok will be showing you will be of puppies and dogs. Additionally, those videos have a hashtag that relates to puppies and dogs and as a result, strengthens the content topic distribution to you about puppies and dogs.
Now it is time for you to start exploring TikTok and implement it into your business strategy. The first step is to download the app and set up your profile.
Once you have that setup, here is a bit more info about what you will see and how to use the app.
As you can see the first image on your left shows you how your profile will look like once you set it up and upload more content. The middle image shows you the Home page. On the Home page, you will come across two kinds of content, the first is the people you follow and the second is the For You page which is where you will find fresh new content and where your content will be posted and gaining the interest of users. On the last image, on the right, you can see the Discover page. On that page, you can see the trending hashtags and videos and start gaining ideas on what’s popular right now.
Once you play around the content that is being posted and start gaining ideas you’ll be ready to start creating your own. Don’t be scared to create content that may flop at the beginning, it takes time to get the hang of it. The most important thing is to keep an eye on what’s going strong and see how you can implement those trends into your content.
Now that you’re ready to play on the field, here is how you’ll be uploading your videos. On the home page, or discovery page you will find the + button ( as you can see on the image on the left). Once you click on that button you will be directed to the screen you see on your left. Here you will have an option to either record your content or upload ready content. In the middle image you can see how your content will look, here you can trim and edit your content to fit the 15- 60-second video length. Now, after that part is done, the next step is to add effects, sounds, text and whatever else you want to make your video stand out.
The sounds on your TikTok video is also very important. It has been shown that people who use the popular and trending songs on TikTok are seeing better results. This should be something to think about while creating your video. Once the video is all set you go to next from the previous image, which will take you to the screen you see in the image to the left. Here you will create your caption and add the hashtags you’d like (more on that in the next section). When this is all ready, it’s time to post.
This is the step-by-step process of how TikTok generally works on its fundamental level. Now it’s time to explore how you can build a strategy and have it work for your business.
Testing & Building a TikTok Strategy for Your Business
First things first, here are some businesses that are using TikTok to promote themselves.
Before we start talking about strategy if you’re indeed planning to make your TikTok account business-related you need to change it into a pro account (completely free). The reason you should be changing it into a pro account is simple, tracking your analytics and overall growth. Just like you have your Instagram analytics, here you have TikTok analytics showing you how your videos are doing and how much response you’re getting back for your content.
Here is how to convert to a Pro account:
Now that you converted your account to Pro it is time to discuss strategy.
The information I am going to share with you is based on my own TikTok research & my trial and error. These are the main points you should be considering when you are going to get started on TikTok
1. Pick a topic/ niche/ theme
To gain a following and have people interested in your business, you need to create a consistent image. That image could come by creating content that is based on your niche alone, talks about a specific topic in your business like production or a theme you will follow such as storytime and share stories about your business. The possibilities are endless. I would suggest to first go do your research and see what kind of content makes you comfortable and makes you excited to create. Once you settle that start creating and posting. By seeing the response you will know how to direct your content further.
2. Follow trends & Make them work for your business.
Trends on TikTok are powerful. Trends vary from sound choice, content, challenges, and hashtags. You can see if something is a trend if it shows up a lot on your For You page or you see the number of people who used a hashtag on the discovery page.
Following those trends and seeing how you can fit them around your business content could score your major interest points.
This is an example of a trend that has sound and content in it all at once:
Seeing this trend, how can you fit your business into it? This is where your creativity comes in.
3. Creativity
This might be an obvious thing if you’ve watched a TikTok or two, but it’s not so simple. When you look at the kind of content being produced on Instagram and Facebook it is clear to see that it is very different than TikTok. The biggest selling point on TikTok is the creator’s creativity when delivering the content.
To be more creative and not simply make a video of your inventory in a pretty font, think about your target audience and search the content they might be watching on TikTok. For instance, if you’re a beauty blogger and you have 5 key skincare products that everyone should use right now, how would you deliver in 60 seconds or less? One way could be showing the product and having a nice text overlay above it another way could be showing you using the products on your face within those 60 seconds.
You see creativity is endless, you just need to put some thought into it and not be scared of the result. Even if the video fails to have views, you now now that you should be doing something different for your audience.
4. Push Content & Don’t Be Perfect
TikTok loves content, it thrives on it and the more you feed it with content the better you’d learn about your audience. Unlike Instagram and Facebook, you don’t need to be polished and perfect ( unless it’s an essential part of your brand).
When people discover you on TikTok it is often through the For You page, meaning that they are not consuming more than that one video from you. You have that one video to make a 15-60 impression on them and then they will decide if they like it and if they wanna follow you for more.
If you post content a few times a day then the likelihood of more people stumbling across your content gets higher, especially if you use different hashtags.
Don’t be concerned about being perfect, be concerned about being present. You can perfect your videos as you go but if you center everything around the perfection of your video you’re the one stopping your growth.
5. Hashtags
Like every social media, hashtags are essential for categorizing you in a niche and helping people find the topics they like. On TikTok, the use of hashtags is slightly different. When you upload a video you use the most relevant hashtags to the content of the video. Currently, there is no specific number of hashtags to use, but I would recommend no more than 7 to keep the topic centered as much as possible.
When deciding on hashtags look up the top 10 you think fit your specific video best and then look at how many times they were used (it will show you once you type a hashtag in the search of description). Use the hashtags with the highest number of uses. This means it’s popular and many people are interested in the content of that hashtag.
The way hashtags work on TikTok is by showing people content that they like based on previous content patterns (remember my puppy example from above). This is how Tik Tok decides who to put your content in front first for it to perform best before it shows it on a larger scale.
6. Influencer Marketing
The influencers are growing their platforms and are using TikTok in creative ways to push sponsored content. If you have it in your budget to use influencers as part of your TikTok strategy, then go for it. It is a great way for you to generate content for your own TikTok and see how the influencer’s followers respond to your products.
The following videos are not sponsored but they show a great way influencers can market your products.
Final thoughts
TikTok is on the rise and could potentially disrupt Instagram in the near future. If you don’t adapt to the changes your business might be left behind and you’ll be missing out on many new customers and opportunities.