How emerging brands are utilising TikTok

So you may be thinking, how do I start growing my TikTok account to ensure I am reaching my desired audience? It can be daunting when initially building a new social media profile, and it is less common than we are often led to believe that your TikTok video is going to blow up overnight and you’ll wake up with millions of followers. Growing your account takes time and dedication, and will take a bit of trial and error to begin with, to see what type of content your audience best responds to, whether that’s short or long-form videos, trending sounds or lighthearted trends.

You can grow your TikTok organically through being consistent and engaging with your audience first-hand, or working with existing creators on the platform who already have an established following, to sky-rocket your brand visibility and reach large audiences. The importance of the ‘For You’ page is crucial in ensuring that your brand is keeping up with the latest trends, whilst also keeping an eye out for what your competitors are doing.

A lot of TikTok success comes from jumping on the latest trends, such as trending sounds or trending effect videos, but making it relate to your own individual brand and market. Whilst you can create loose content plans for TikTok, reacting to trending features on the same day that it is trending, is what is really going to boost your brand and give it the strongest chance of getting posted on others’ ‘For You’ pages.

As TikTok works by identifying what users’ passions and interests are to curate their personalised ‘For You’ page, it is important that TikTok is recognising what your content purpose is and the audience you are trying to reach. There are a few methods to help TikTok to understand what your content is about and who it is aimed at.

The first is to add keywords as text on your video that you are uploading. So this isn’t just within your caption, but instead on the actual video. For example, if you are posting a video featuring a recipe, ensure that you utilise the text format to say something along the lines of “Make My Special Homemade Carbonara Dish With Me” or whatever best describes your content. You can also drag text off of the screen so that you are still including keywords but they are not shown on the displayed video, so you could add words such as “recipe” and “pasta recipe” to help TikTok to identify the video purpose, without affecting the overall aesthetic.

TikTok loves storytelling content, such as vlogs and ‘day in the life’ videos where you take your audience on a journey. This is due to TikTok taking note of how long your videos are being watched for. With storytelling content, viewers are likely to watch for a longer period of time, which in-turn makes TikTok believe it is good content and pushes it to more users’ ‘For You’ pages. You can record up to three minutes of content per video, which can be useful for storytelling purposes.

Hashtags can also help to boost your post, however contrary to the idea that the more hashtags the better, a recent finding shows that TikTok prefers a limited number of hashtags such as 3-5 per post. TikTok recommends utilising a few general hashtags and then a couple that are more niche to your brand, in order to generate the best results. Too many hashtags can appear as spam to TikTok, which can be limiting your chances of exposure.

Luckily, TikTok makes it easy for you to monitor how your account is doing through its free business tools available on the app. To access the business tools, you must ensure that your account is set to be a Business Account rather than a Personal Account which can be changed in your account settings. You will then be able to see multiple insights and analytics relating to your account by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the top right corner and clicking ‘Creator Tools’  and then ‘Analytics’. Here you will be able to see an overview of your content, including profile views, follower insights and view counts to see how your content is performing. This is an ideal and low-cost method of analysing your TikTok performance and identifying what is working well, or isn’t working so well for your audience.

TikTok’s audience is international, so you can also see the top countries/regions that are engaging with your content, as well as age and gender. This also means that your brand has the potential to connect with more audiences overseas by using TikTok as a marketing tool.

Another great tool is the TikTok Business newsletter – free tips, tricks and advice for maximising TikTok for your brand delivered straight to your inbox. You can sign up here.