There aren’t many people today who HAVEN’T heard of TikTok. It is a great platform with endless opportunities for you and your business. With over 1 billion users worldwide, you have the potential to reach millions of people. While there is no perfect recipe for being on TikTok, there are some things you can do to help leverage your brand’s presence on the app. Continue reading for some of our TikTok best practices.
How to Get Started
Before you get started, it’s important to consider a few things. First, does it even make sense for your business to be there? Do you have a product or service that could be featured in video content? Is your audience younger than 35? Is your brand trendy and cool? Next, you will want to think about who will make your TikToks. Do you have a designated person on your team already or will you need to hire someone? and what sort of budget you might need to make them.
If you have gone through all of these questions and decided to make an account, congratulations! Now is the fun part.
You want to set up your profile like you would on any other social network. Create a good username, set a profile picture and write out your bio that let’s people know exactly what you do.
Next you can start exploring content to get some ideas and get your algorithm going. Search specific users and follow them, scroll through videos under industry hashtags or just start scrolling on your For You Page and liking videos you find appealing. This let’s TikTok know what you are interested in and what type of videos you might be posting, which can eventually direct your videos to show up on your audiences For You Page.
Once you have a few ideas for some videos you can make, it’s time to get started! Here are some of our TikTok best practices.
Best Practices
It’s important to find a balance between entertaining videos and promotional videos. Joining in on TikTok trends can be a good way to get your content out there to a lot of people. Keep an eye out for trending sounds or video types and see if you can apply it to your brand. On the other hand, you don’t want trends to be your only videos. Make sure you are creating some branded or promotional videos as well to establish yourself on the platform and grow your audience.
Make sure that when you are recording or creating TikToks, that you are using the 9:16 video size, which is full screen.
The majority of the TikTok algorithm is AI based, hashtags still help. You will want to use a mix of popular hashtags, niche hashtags and branded hashtags on your tikTok videos. Popular hashtags get your content out there on popular searches or trends for that time. The downside is, it has the potential to get lost among the multitude of videos using those hashtags at the time. You want to use niche hashtags specific to your business or industry to better target your audience. Branded hashtags help your audience to find you quicker on the app.
It’s important to note that timing.is.everything on TikTok. Not only in the length of your videos (which ideally is 9-15 seconds), but in the times you post as well. You don’t want to post a trendy video 2 weeks after the trend has passed. Trends move very quickly on TikTok, so it’s important to stay up to date and get your videos out in a timely manner.
How to Create Your Own Strategy
First, you need to decide what your goal is for using Tiktok. Are you looking to create brand awareness, sell products or services or build a community (just to name a few)?
The next step would be to set up your profile, preferably a business profile if that suits you. A business profile gives you access to adding extra information on your profile and to analytics and insights.
Come up with a posting schedule that works for you and your business. A good rule of thumb is to post once a day if you are trying to build a following and establish brand awareness. Spend some time on TikTok curating your For You Page and interacting with other accounts. Check our your competitors and see how they are doing. Come up with ideas for videos and begin posting. Remember our previous suggestion about a good mix of popular content and branded content.
After you have begun posting, you will want to check in on your progress at least once a month to see if your strategy is working. If you find that your trendy videos do better than your branded, maybe experiment with adding a couple more into your schedule each week (or vise-versa).
At the end of the day, there is no real recipe for creating the perfect TikTok and going viral. A lot of it is trial and error and experimenting with different content. Play around with videos and see what works for your business. TikTok is a great platform that can occasionally change people’s lives, but it is meant to be fun and light hearted! We hope these TikTok best practices help you and your business.
If you have any questions or need help getting started on your social media strategies, contact us! We would love to help you.