With over 1.7 billion users”, TikTok has almost revolutionized how people interact with technology and the internet. In one of the more striking examples, Google execs worried that Gen Z users are going to TikTok to search for new things to try or popular products.
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And with the right audience and strong following, you can leverage this level of interactivity and grow your own brand. But this all starts by getting more TikTok followers to begin a chain reaction. Here’s how you can do that.
Create a TikTok Content Strategy
If you think about it, TikTok is another tool at your disposal to create a powerful brand presence. However, managing a TikTok account is as much of a job itself. If you don’t invest in your TikTok presence from a business standpoint, it will always lag behind those who did. So, how to do that?
Learn About Your Audience
The best way to think of your TikTok strategy is from the perspective of your audience. What do your followers want to see from you? Perhaps more importantly, what do they not want to see?
If you’re struggling to answer these questions, you might have failed to identify your target audience properly. When starting from scratch, you can use your main competitors as a starting point. Find out the main audience niches your competition is targeting and go from there. You can outcompete them with more relevant and high-quality content or zero in on a particular niche and create more curated content that has better click-through rates.
Alternatively, you can use information from other social media and communication channels to develop your TikTok strategy. Create interactive polls on what your existing clients would like to see and use their information (such as demographic groups they belong to) to extrapolate on the audience niche that will most likely respond to your posts.
Go Beyond Mindless Fun
Keep in mind that your content needs to follow three Es: engaging, educational, and entertaining. While it can be easy to think of TikTok videos as just a time-waster, many users go to TikTok to find and learn about things they might not have encountered before. Videos that are only meant to entertain and never showcase how your brand can help them in their lives might be setting your channel up for failure.
Users will watch your video, maybe add a like or a comment, and then move on with their lives. But by providing educational or informational content, you can develop a more meaningful connection with your audience.
Be Consistent
As with a lot of things in life, consistency is the key to success on TikTok. Your audience will likely get bombarded by suggestions from the TikTok algorithm. But the “Following” section is where your audience will find your videos, and where you’ll compete with other popular brands they’re following for visibility.
To leverage the “Following” tab to your success, you need to show up frequently, steadily, or both. You can do that by creating a custom TikTok posting schedule. You don’t have to post multiple videos per day, but it will help if your posts coincide with when your audience is most active on the platform.
You can use your profile “Followers” tab to learn more about your audience’s habits, particularly what country or region they’re from and at what times they access TikTok the most. Then, you can use a posting or social media management tool to schedule posts right down to a minute.
This backtracks into the first way to get more followers. By using information about your existing followers, you can see what works to attract similar ones.
Jump on the Trend Bandwagon
TikTok is all about user engagement and trends. But new popular content can sprout out of nowhere and take the world by storm. TikTok was built on lip-sync and dancing videos, and this type of content has largely persevered and got incorporated into other video types. Take fashion influencers like Amalie Star, for example. The videos essentially contain a musical backdrop with the influencer lip-syncing to songs or speeches.
However, the videos also showcase the power of search engine optimization. The video title, description, text, and hashtags all play an important role in allowing the algorithm to categorize the video and suggest it to users who are most likely to interact with it.
You can use the Discover page and the Search bar to learn the most viral trends. But it would help if you also determined what other creators in your industry are using for their hashtags. By combining the most popular hashtags on all of TikTok with the ones used by your audience, you can ensure that the right part of the global audience sees your work.
Additionally, don’t forget to instill a sense of time, season, or urgency in your video. While high-quality, timeless content sets up your authority, you need to play on your viewers’ sense of time (or lack thereof) to get more TikTok followers and build a profitable TikTok brand.
Another way to use trends to your advantage is to leverage branded hashtags and user-created content. The former might be tricky if you’re already a brand since you’ll need to create your own and spread the word. However, you can use popular hashtag challenges that are already circulating and devise your spin on them. Then, use the content posted by your fans to develop a more meaningful connection with your audience niche.
By showing your audience that you track their activity on TikTok and care about their opinions, they will be more incentivized to do the same.
Don’t Be Afraid to Get a Jump Start
While building your TikTok brand might seem daunting, the platform itself provides plenty of opportunity to do so. The first way is to use a TikTok Business account. This account type allows you a more comprehensive view of your profile analytics, going beyond the 60-day range provided to regular (Creator) accounts. It also gives you the opportunity to put business links in the profile bio and access the TikTok Shop.
However, a Business account might not be suitable for a small creator whose primary goal is to be an influencer and work with other brands. You get more limited video monetization options and won’t be able to use the entire TikTok sound library for creating content.
There’s also another way to boost your presence on TikTok, and that’s by buying TikTok followers. While this might seem like a dodgy tactic at first, it can be a legitimate way to grow your online presence. Using a trusted growth platform, you can get organic, high-quality followers that the algorithm can use to position your content in front of a larger audience.
Even if your content is extremely high-quality, followers might be wary of new accounts with no significant interaction. Buying followers bypasses this starting point and creates more credibility.
This way, your account can more easily gather an organic following and grow.
