With about a billion monthly active users, TikTok blew the lid off of how brands do social media. How do you need to adjust your strategy in order to leverage the platform to your advantage? In this blog, you’ll learn more about marketing on TikTok, walking away with six tips that you can implement today.

Psst! Check out our blog for more TikTok content strategy tips.

Marketing on TikTok: 6 Tips for Brands to Dominate

While this is going to take some testing (and a bunch of trial and error — this is normal!), these tips apply to most brands and will help you get started marketing on TikTok on the right foot.

1. See What Your Competitors are Up To

TikTok is in a league of its own. It’s going to help you immensely to find some of your competitors who are succeeding on TikTok and analyze what and how they post. Consider these questions:

• Approximately how long are their Toks?
• Are they posting hacks, demos, behind-the-scenes?
• What’s the tone — informative, humorous?
• What hashtags are they using? (More on this in a moment.)
  

The goal isn’t to copy them. That’s never a good idea. Rather, simply use what your competition is posting as inspiration, find a way to do it better, and put your own creative spin on it. This is how you use TikTok for business. Strategy is key!

2. Post Often and Consistently

TikTok isn’t like other platforms. You can and should post multiple times a day, especially if your account is new. Depending on who you ask, this might mean sharing anywhere from three to 11 posts a day. (Sound like a lot? It is. Keep reading, because we’ll offer tips to make it a little easier.)

Here’s why this approach for marketing on TikTok works. When you post something on the platform, the algorithm pushes it to a small test audience. If it performs well, it pushes it to more people, and this is how you (might potentially) go viral. But! This isn’t going to happen every time. In fact, it might not happen all that often, at all.

So, to increase your chances of posting something that really gains traction, you have to post frequently and on a regular basis. As your account grows and gains authority with the algorithm, you’ll be able to tone it down a bit.

3. Opt for Specific Hashtags

A lot of brands and content creators mistakenly use generic hashtags like #fyp and #foryoupage. This doesn’t work for two reasons: (1) These hashtags are too broad, and (2) they're too generic.

Others will attempt to hop on trending hashtags that have nothing to do with their content. This also doesn’t work because, again, it has nothing to do with their content. The hashtags are irrelevant and misplaced.

Instead, go for hashtags that are more specific to that piece of content. It’s okay if it has a smaller audience size. In fact, this can work to your advantage. It’s going to mean that that hashtag is less competitive.

For example, #socialmedia currently has 3.2 billion views. This is cool because it gets a ton of attention. However, you’re going to have a hard time being seen for this hashtag. Instead, opt for something like #social_media, which has 2.9 million views. (This is still a lot, and you could continue to go narrower. Try mixing it up and using hashtags with different sizes!)

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4. Batch Your Work

Here’s some advice for making marketing on TikTok more streamlined and efficient.

We’ve talked about how to batch your social media posts in the past. Batching means you do all of one type of work, and then all of another type, and so on.

To make managing your TikTok account easier, batch your responsibilities. For instance, you might dedicate a single time block solely to coming up with ideas/scripts. Then, work only on filming. Then, focus on editing.

The idea with batching is that by making your brain concentrate on only one type of task at a time, you’ll be able to get it done quicker.

5. Get on Trends Early

Hopping on trends can bring your TikTok page massive traffic, but you have to time it right. If you create content with a trending hashtag, sound, or effect a week after it took off, is it going to hurt? No. But is it going to help you a ton? Probably not.

This one is trickier because it requires you to be a little more hands-on, but here’s what you can do. Let’s use trending audio as an example. Go to that audio clip’s page and look at two things: (1) how many videos it has, and (2) how many times it’s been used in the last few days.

If the videos are relatively low (in the ballpark of about 10,000-500,000) and you see that it’s been gaining steam over the last few days, then it might be going viral, and you are just on time.

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You can also go to the Discover page and see which hashtags are getting a lot of attention. Find a way to apply them to your brand, and post away!

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6. Go Live on a Consistent Basis

Note: You need at least 1,000 followers before you can do this.

Going live on TikTok is a nice way to grab new followers and increase your activity because TikTok is going to notify people when you go live.

However, the traffic it brings could be short-lived (which is the nature of going live), so you’ll want to be sure to do this regularly. Aim for once a week, to start. If you can handle more, go for it!

TikTok — and social media in general — has a lot of moving parts. Managing it on your own can be a challenge. Book a free consultation with LSM and let’s see how we can work together on it.