5 Tips for your Brand on TikTok
TikTok - you know what it is, every one and their dog seems to be on it and you're getting a lack of sleep by falling down the TikTok rabbit hole flicking through hours worth of videos at night.
Incase, you're not up to date with TikTok, here is a quick catch up:
Launched in 2016, the video-sharing social networking service is where people could share and edit videos. The platform consists of 15- and 60-second user-recorded videos that allow for in-app editing and integration with the other main social media platforms.
With more than 1.5 billion downloads on the App Store and Google Play, it is currently used in over 150 countries and has more than 500 million active monthly users.
Before you decide to jump on this popular social media platform, get to know TikTok, analyse the platform and really consider if this is the right move for your business, brand and strategy.
Once you've decided to get on board with TikTok, how can you take your brand to TikTok?
In this post we will take a look at 5 tips to get you started with TikTok.
1. Understanding your audience
If you are planning to take your brand to TikTok then it is vital you truly understand your audiences.
Once you understand exactly who your audiences are, then you should search for relevant hashtags your audiences are engaging with and the types of content they like. Using this research and information you can start to form creative ideas for your content
2. Join the right trends
Although original content is extremely important, this doesn't mean you can't join in on the trends. The key point here is to jump on trends that relate to, or that can be implemented with your brand, product or service.
If you're a car manufacturer and there's a trend where people put slices of cheese on their cats faces, it's not going to work for you. If there's a trend where people do a before and after when washing their cars, then this is something you can work with.
3. Draw attention straight away
You have done it yourself, you quickly flick your way through videos without spending more than one second on each one.
Due to this, you will need to grab the attention of the viewer with-in the first second. You can do this in a variety of ways, but you will want to get creative and think how to do this yourself - just don't let your video roll on without anything happening.
As an example you can use the text feature. Overlay text on your video to grab the users attention or trigger their curiosity. 'watch until the end', 'this is so good', 'can you do this?', 'I can't believe this just happened'... You get the picture.
4. Don't force your brand
No one likes to be forced anything. An analogy I like to use is cake; If you're trying to force cake down someones throat - they won't eat it, even if they're hungry as it's not a pleasant experience. However, put a slice of cake on the side and they will willingly eat the cake, perhaps even take a bite even if they aren't hungry.
This rule applies to your brand. Don't force it upon your users and don't try to sell your product or service directly - the idea is to combine temptation, curiosity, creativity and subtlety.
5. Engage with your audience
As with any social channel, you need to be engaging with your audience actively. I would like to point out that TikTok has a nice feature to reply with video. As it's a video based social platform, you will want to make use of this feature when replying to comments as this will keep users engaging with your content.
To explore more about what social media platforms are best for your brand and how to develop a successful brand strategy, contact our team.
Wendy Ford, PR & Social Media Manager: wendy.ford@dupreeinternational.com