Alexis Kestler
Every serious social media marketer nowadays must have to think about TikTok marketing ideas. It seems that it appeared out of nowhere and gained tremendous popularity overnight.
In the first quarter of 2021, this app had 315 million downloads, which is the best result (in quarters) ever, by any app. In 2021 it was the second most downloaded app (behind WhatsApp) with 738 million downloads. It is available in 154 countries and the most popular app in 25 of them. A great marketing platform, isn’t it?
It seems that TikTok appeared out of nowhere and gained tremendous popularity overnight. Despite its fame and constantly growing, the app had some security issues and it was even banned in some countries.
Putting that together with the fact that it was in the first place targeting teens and young audience, you may ask why bother with TikTok marketing? With just-released feature TikTok for Business, it is more concentrating on sales and advertising. It’s getting serious.
What is TikTok and How it Works?
TikTok is a free social media app, mostly focused on uploading short videos. It has two options: up to 15 seconds or 60 seconds. You can watch, create and share videos from your smartphone. Those videos are grouped by hashtags and it is known for many challenges. You can also connect with friends and followers by liking, commenting and singing or dancing duets.
You can sign up with your phone number, email address, Facebook or Instagram. Once you start, you can search for interesting content by its creators, categories or hashtags. You can connect with your friends by syncing phone or social media contacts.
In the beginning, TikTok was music app, but now it has more variety in the videos that people share. As the themes started to spread, it has developed a classic promotion of the products – people who share videos using some products or promote them in another way.
If you are a TikTok user, you don’t actually have to share videos or even follow anybody. It gives you an option to just watch what you like, under the “Discover” tab.
How can a Business use TikTok?
There are three ways to use TikTok for marketing:
– To create a channel and post videos relevant to your business.
– To connect with TikTok influencers to promote your products or services.
– And, to use paid advertising.
Or, it can be a combination of those.
Challenges
Challenges are TikTok’s most popular feature for sure. They are usually tagged with some creative hashtag so they can be found easier, but also some of them went viral pretty fast. It seems that users like that kind of fun. And the good thing is they can participate in just a few clicks.
As a business, you can encourage people to start challenges. Unfortunately, this will only work well if you already built a perspective channel and you have some audience to support it. If you don’t, you can use influencers to promote it for you.
User-Generated Content (UGC)
UGC is any content (text, videos, images, reviews, etc.) created by people, rather than brands. And brands will often share UGC on their own social media accounts, website, and other channels.
Users of TikTok are (mostly) people who like to be involved. Of course, there are always watchers. But, this is an app that pushes people to participate. And this can work well for you. Again, that is also an option where you can use influencers, but not necessarily.
Most of the content on TikTok (if not all) is user-generated. That means it’s authentic.
Which Content is Popular?
In other social networks, original and creative content is crucial. Unlike that, TikTok is more focused on trends. Usually, the ones that are easy to imitate.
Trends are mostly, but not limited to dancing. There are also topics like comedy, animals, beauty, gaming, food, fashion etc. If you are not sure what, to begin with, check the discovery page.
TikTok Ads
With TikTok Advertising for Business, there are options available that are worth exploring for sure. In-feed ads are labelled as “sponsored” in your news feed and there is a call-to-action option.
Recently launched Creator Marketplace is “The official platform for brand and creator collaborations on TikTok”. Here you can create content that will be easily promoted in other users feeds, to increase your visibility. It connects you with partners who create content. And, it also gives you tips.
TikTok Marketing in General
As I already said – TikTok is growing at the moment. That means there is a great audience waiting to be impressed and every business could see its opportunity here. Business who accepted TikTok early, already reaped some great success and rewards. But, it has a fair system for beginners.
As you already know, when you first open your fresh installed app, you already have some content there even if you didn’t follow anyone. That gives a fair start to businesses who just began to post content because they can easily gain likes and audience.
How their algorithm works is still a well-kept secret, but being able to have millions of views and yet hardly any followers, leads us to the conclusion that it counts individual video (not the whole account). So, if you have great content, you can do well.
