TikTok has grown to be one of the most popular social media platforms, gaining billions of global users that continue to grow effortlessly. In 2022, the app unveiled one of its best-performing years as it turned out to be the world’s most downloaded app, excelling Google’s predominance as the most popular web domain, and becoming the world’s highest-grossing app.
An extensive variety of users and companies including B2C, B2B and non-profits all have a brand presence on TikTok, which makes it a powerful platform for marketing if planned and executed strategically. In this way, we present to you a list of different ways TikTok can help boost your business through its main tools.
Virality
Part of the success that TikTok has had can be attributed to its discovery capabilities. Think of this platform as a gold mine, where trends emerge and are then extended to other platforms to ultimately become adopted into pop culture.
Because of the algorithm configuration, it is easy for your business to go viral. This is due to the fact that content recommendations are based on the videos that you have interacted with (be it watched, liked, shared, and/or commented on); who you follow; what content you have created; what the elements of the video are (including captions, sounds, hashtags); and your account demographics.
By using trending sounds or audio from either the TikTok library or by saving them from other videos, you can gain more brand exposure. This is because they can give origin to memes, create a song hit, inspire cross-platform content, or become part of a bigger conversation.
Challenges on their part, are a great source of virality as they induce user participation, and sometimes they can even encourage non-users to join the platform. Hashtags play a key role in trends and challenges and can launch your visibility to a major level. Likewise, partnering with influential content creators to promote your brand will help you reach a much wider audience.
It can also be deduced that TikTok contributes to your brand awareness and engagement through its property that allows users to download videos and share them with other users and platforms, making your content able to reach a larger audience. This may be a reason that explains the nonstop growth that the platform has experienced.
Engagement
Being a video-sharing social platform by nature, it is no surprise that TikTok lets you respond to comments through a video. By liking comments from your audience and replying to their comments, it will make your customers feel heard and appreciated.
Also, TikTok is well-known for its short video formats, which consumers have shown preference for. Short videos are not only easy to digest, but they generate the most engagement as well. Therefore, it is of great importance to capitalise on all of the platform’s features to create engaging content for your target audience.
You are able to browse through a wide range of filters and visual effects that will help your videos become more appealing: green screens, facial masks, interactive masks, transitions, and stickers to name a few. You can see the name of the effect displayed at the bottom left corner, and once it is clicked, it opens search results for that specific effect. Similarly, when saving a song from another video, it will show you a list of videos that use the same audio.
Communities
Duet and Stitching, are just a couple examples of TikTok’s unique features that not only make your videos more engaging, but collaborative too. While the former allows posting a video next to another, the latter lets you trim clips from another video on TikTok and add them to the one you are creating.
TikTok’s platform is designed in such a way that places the community at its very core. Just like its name, the Following feed displays videos from the accounts you are following, and For You is a page consisting of videos selected by the algorithm based on your activity. Either way, both kinds of feeds foster the growth of communities as they show the kind of content you like or from people you are interested in.
Creating branded content will help expand your community and foster brand loyalty. Hashtags can differentiate you from other brands, and can even help you to target niche groups. Thus, branded hashtag challenges not only will increase your reach, but strengthen your community too. You might even start new trends yourself, by inciting users to participate in these dynamics.
Bear in mind that TikTok moves at a fast pace and so do the trends that go hand in hand with it. However, even though it is crucial to constantly stay updated on the actual trends, it is also essential for your brand to experiment with your content. If some of your videos do not turn out to be as successful as you had anticipated, you can “recycle” them and try different audio and effect options and compare the outcomes.
On the other hand, it was mentioned before that influencers and content creators are a good source of exposure for your brand. Thus, you might want to consider creating content with them through duets, branded hashtags, or challenges to increase user engagement and grow your community.
In conclusion, the exceptional growth that TikTok has had in the last few years can be attributed to the creative tools that distinguish it from other platforms. The marketing benefits that it brings to users and businesses include virality, awareness, engagement, communities and brand loyalty.
