Using Tik-Tok to Your Full Advantage
By: Alyssa Serbak, Duquesne University
After about 5 months of learning everything possible about the key aspects of social media and digital marketing, I am going to teach you now about how to take the things I have learned, and turning them towards the latest, hit, social media app... Tik-Tok.
About Tik-Tok
Tik-tok launched in 2016 by a Chinese company known as ByteDance. Tik-tok was not always Tik-tok though, for it took over the app Musical.ly which ByteDance bought. With buying Musical.ly, all of the accounts and videos transferred right over to Tik-tok. Tik-tok launched its present form in 2018, taking off to then become one of the fastest growing platforms with about one billion active monthly users worldwide with an additional 200 million U.S. downloads (Wallaroo Media & Investopedia).
How does Tik-tok work?
Tik-tok is a social media platform in which you can make 15-, 30-, 60-, or 180-second-long videos about, well, anything! After you create your video, you can add filters, captions, and the most important aspect hashtags. Tik-tok’s algorithm is what allows videos to “blow up” reaching possibly millions of people. Using hashtags puts your videos out there to people who have similar interests. This allows your videos to be liked and shared among many people of similar interests. The more likes, shares and comments your video gets, the more people who your video is exposed to. This means, if you create some pretty relatable content, you can reach many people of that target audience.
Tik-tok profile screen
Taking advantage of the algorithm
In this section, I am going to teach you the key aspects to “blowing up”, hitting those one million views, from my own experience! You heard that right, future Tik-tok star in the making right here:
1. Creating the hit video
When creating your hit Tik-tok video, you want to make sure it is something that a lot of people can relate to. Whether you’re creating a video for a brand account or for your own personal account, you want to have the right target audience in mind, and make sure you are appealing to them. Sometimes the most popular videos are popular from slight controversy in the comments. For example, I created a Tik-tok about throwing my old contacts behind my bed every day for the whole school year, then leading to me cleaning them up at the end of the year (My Contact Tiktok). The controversy in the comments comes from people who also did the same thing as me, or the people who are totally grossed out. Key component: find that target audience!
2. Captions, captions, captions
An aspect from my own experience is that putting a caption directly onto your video, while still including a caption and the regular caption section, is something that will attract more viewers. This is because during a portion of the video, the viewers take extra time and missed watching the video to read what is on the screen. This will cause viewers to then go back and re watch your video to see what they missed while reading the caption on the screen, which in the long run attracts more viewers and accounts to your video. As I said above, adding those perfect hashtags to attract your target audience is also a key aspect to getting your video out there to as many viewers as possible.
3. Share it like no other
As soon as your video is posted, make sure to share it or let your friends know to go like it right away. With the immediate viewings of a few of your friends, it helps to put your video out there because they see that people are viewing it, liking it, commenting on it, and then sharing it very soon after posting.
4. Don’t go on the app...
This is a key aspect that I found out for myself through experimenting on the app. Me saying don't go on Tik-tok after just posting a video, sounds crazy! It’s what pulls the most viewers to your account. After you post a Tik-tok video, the app wants you to keep scrolling and keep creating. The trick to this is that you are leaving the app, for let's just say a 3 hour span after creating a video, it's going to confuse the app. Because the app sees you have left, it is going to attract more viewers to your account so that you'll get the notification that your video is being liked more which will pull you back onto the app to continue scrolling. My trick is that I turn off my notifications, leave the app for about three to four hours (which can be very difficult as somebody who is addicted to the app) and then that leads to more viewers being directed to my video.
Tracking analytics on Tik-tok
Throughout our class this semester, we have used analytics through Google Analytics itself, Instagram, and Twitter. Just as the other apps, Tik-tok also has its own way of tracking all the traffic that comes to your account. When you are on your profile, go into the settings page where under the general section you can find an analytics tab. Under your analytics tab, in the overview section you can set your date range to figure out your analytics over whatever time you would like. After setting your date you can go under and engagement section which contains video views, profile views, likes, comments and shares. With each of those sections, you can also see a percentage number to see how much your content has gone up or down in that time. Within analytics, you can also see your total number of followers, how many followers you have gained and lost overtime, the average gender and location of your followers along with a follower activity section which shows when your followers are most active during what days and hours of the week. It is very convenient that tik-tok allows you to view all of these analytics with an easy to follow, easy to find section within the app.
Get out there and get creating!
Now that you know all the basics about how to blow up on tik-tok and incorporate analytics to improve your account, get out there and get creating! It takes one video to blow up, so whether that is a cooking video, a dancing video, a shopping haul video, or you just being yourself, never stop creating because your life could totally change after one video. you could be the next Charli D'Amelio.
Cited sources:
Other pursue persuade articles to check out:
https://pursue-persuade.squarespace.com/home-1/2022/4/26/who-is-behind-the-account
https://pursue-persuade.squarespace.com/home-1/2022/tik-tok-climbing-number-1
https://pursue-persuade.squarespace.com/home-1/2022/4/26/6-tips-to-podcasting-2
https://pursue-persuade.squarespace.com/home-1/tiktok-famous