What is TikTok Marketing?
The popularity of Tiktok has surprisingly exploded out of nowhere and has become the third most downloaded app in 2019 surpassing Facebook and Instagram. What is Tiktok (and Tiktok marketing) and what makes it so famous that people, especially the younger generations, have become addicted to it?
Tiktok: A Short-Video Sharing Platform
Tiktok is a video-sharing social network that’s only available on mobile. It allows its users to record up to 60-second videos that are on vertical display. Tiktok users are given many options to video editing tools including filters, effects, texts, timers, and different music and audio options. Recording, editing, and uploading videos on Tiktok is simple and easy, and very user-friendly.
Viewers then have the option to like, comment, and share the videos they see in their For You dashboard.
The History
The Tiktok we all use today is the combination of two platforms – musical.ly and Douyin – the Chinese version of Tiktok. In 2017, muscial.ly was acquired by ByteDance, the owner of the Douyin App and the parent company of Tiktok. ByteDance retained Douyin in mainland China and relaunched musical.ly to the rest of the world as Tiktok.
Why Market in Tiktok?
As of today, Tiktok has about 500 million monthly active users with more than 90% of its users who log in multiple times a day. This is a great number of audience you wanna introduce your brand across!
Marketing in this platform with its sensational growth has become a buzz in the digital marketing world. And with over 1.5 billion users, anyone can see why it has the potential to be a great marketing tool for your business!
Although this app leans towards marketing to young people, it is not to be underestimated. This marketing tool is the perfect platform for budding businesses that are looking for a huge audience. With great content, viewers will undoubtedly share your videos and tell their friends and family about it, widening your reach and increasing brand awareness!
Tiktok Marketing
Because of the reach and exposure that Tiktok can provide, marketing in this platform will definitely help increase brand awareness, if not sales.
If you can make content that appeals to Tiktok users and reach more people on the “For You” page, you will quickly boost your brand awareness and perhaps your other social media following.
Tiktok Marketing Tactics
Here are ways how you can use Tiktok to your business’s advantage:
Tiktok Influencers
Like other social media networks, Tiktok has users with a huge following and is growing in popularity for brands. The influencer you work with will find a way to incorporate your brand message in their content to possibly bring attention to it from their viewers. It’s important to note that when working with an influencer, it’s best to let them decide how to introduce your brand to their followers. Yes, you are more knowledgeable about your product but the influencers know best how to tell it to their avid viewers.
Brand Challenges
Challenges are very popular on TikTok, it provides its users regular content ideas for their followers. Usually, these challenges are given a hashtag name to make them easy to find. Trending challenges have a higher probability to end up on Tiktok’s Discover and For You page giving you more reach and possibly engagement.
Tiktok In-Feed Ads
These paid ads will pop up in between user videos and will allow a brand to showcase what they have to offer. The ads are skippable which won’t bother the users and are fully customizable and provide click-through rates, total views, and viewing time that you can trace.
Tiktok Hashtags
Just like how it works on Instagram and Twitter, hashtags in TikTok are used to categorize videos and help users find relevant content. Putting in hashtags in every video you post is recommended.
The best way to understand this sensational social network is by trying out the app yourself. Research. Do experiments. Lurk. The more immersed you are in the platform, the better you understand how it works.
As a marketer who understands the importance of reach, TikTok is a platform that works to improve post reach like no other, and it’s the key marketing benefit of TikTok.
