Eleven top tips for businesses that want to use TikTok

Video sharing app TikTok was the most downloaded app of 2020, with 2.6 billion downloads worldwide by the end of the year. It had 8.5 million users in the UK in 2020 and this is expected to rise to 10.9 million in 2021.

Spend time on the app before you actually start using it

Before you dive in and create your first videos, spend some time on TikTok to get a feel for it. It is a good idea to create a personal profile to play with before setting up your business profile.

There are two main areas of TikTok – the For You page and the Following page. When you open the app, you will be taken to the For You page (FYP). This is where you will see trending videos and top creators. As you start to follow people, you will see more content. But one of the important factors about TikTok is that you don’t actually need to follow anyone to get a good user experience.

The Following page will show you the latest videos from the TikTokers you follow.

If you tap the magnifying glass at the bottom of the screen you will find the Discover page, where you can see the top trending videos, users and hashtags. Use this to follow hashtags to find out what other businesses, including your competitors, are doing. Is there a gap in the market that you can fill with your own TikTok content?

Take time to understand what works, how users interact and how your business can fit in with that naturally.

The more time you spend immersing yourself in TikTok, the better you will understand it and how it can work for your business.



Be authentic

TikTok isn’t about being polished, it’s about being yourself and showing the true personality of your brand to help users connect and relate to your business. And the good news is that you don’t need fancy equipment to create TikToks. In fact, it’s frowned on by users to create content which appears too perfect. TikTok users simply create content on their phones (make sure they are vertical, not horizontal).

It might feel at first that TikTok is only singing and dancing, but there is a niche for everyone. TikTok is all about the trends – some of which come and go in a matter of days. Keep an eye on your EYP to see what the latest trends are and work out a way to tap into them, while also maintaining your own authenticity.

While trends are key to TikTok, there is also no harm in trying something new and letting your personality and brand shine. Even more ‘serious’ businesses need to aim for content that is fun, but that doesn’t mean it should be completely out of your comfort zone and not in keeping with your brand.

Ideas which could work for your business include:

• An introduction to yourself
• A day in the life of your workplace
• A tour of the workplace
• Meet the team
• Meet your pets
• How to use your products
• Shout-out to other small businesses



Use music and filters

Music and filters are a really fundamental part of TikTok – even if you’re not singing or dancing.

The app has almost every popular song available to use, without copyright issues. It’s easy to browse and add music to your videos by tapping the Sounds button at the top of the screen.

Effects include speeding up or slowing down videos. Speeding up is great for things like recipes, DIY, makeover or organisation/ tidying videos.

Filters give you access to different screen colours and contrast levels, while effects will add moving icons to your videos.

Spend time playing around with filters, have fun and find out what works best for your business.



Post regularly

Some TikTok users post videos several times a day. That is unlikely to be possible for most businesses, and the risk is that you will quickly run out of content ideas, but it is important to post regularly. Posting three to five times a week is a good place to start.

Like other forms of social media, TikTok’s algorithm rewards consistency – making your videos visible to more people if you post regularly.

If you’re worried that you might run out of content ideas, it’s a good idea to plan out a content calendar with ideas for the coming week and month. With TikTok trends constantly evolving and changing, it wouldn’t make much sense to plan further ahead than this.

Once you find the sort of content which resonates with your audience and you get used to putting videos together more quickly, you may decide to start posting even more often.



Share your videos

Once you’ve posted a video, how do you know anyone will actually see it? This is a particularly big question if you are just starting out on TikTok or just starting to market to Gen Z.

Of course you could get lucky and your video might be creative enough, funny enough or tap into a trend brilliantly enough to go viral. But the reality is, you will need to put some work into sharing your videos.

The good news is that you can share your TikToks to other social media, like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. If someone enjoys your video, they can share it on their social media too, helping you to reach a much wider audience.

You can also link to your TikTok on any newsletters or emails you send out.

Your audience doesn’t even need to have the app themselves to be able to view your content, so your customers can still check out what you have created.



Use hashtags

One effortless way to share your videos on TikTok is by using hashtags.

Hashtags are part of the caption on TikTok videos and the whole caption is restricted to 150 characters, so it is essential to get your hashtags spot-on and not waste characters on anything irrelevant. To give you some idea of relevant hashtags for your video, type a broad keyword into the search function on TikTok and it will come up with some related hashtags.

There are two types of hashtags – general and specific. General hashtags are more generic and can help you reach a larger number of people who have a general interest in your subject matter.

Specific hashtags will help you focus on the people most likely to enjoy your content and buy your products and services. If your business is operating in a particular geographical area, it is important to include this as one of your hashtags too eg #gloucestershire or #tewkesbury.

Ideally, it is best to use both specific and general hashtags in your TikToks.

Some popular TikTok hashtags for business include:

• #motivationalvideo
• #howto (any tutorial ‘how to’ video)
• #fitness
• #foodrecipe
• #smallbusinesstips
• #beautyblogger



Join hashtag challenges

The key reason for using TikTok as a business is to get your business noticed. Hashtag challenges help you do just that through participation and interaction with other TikTok users.

Hashtag challenges are a lot of fun and great way for your brand to be seen by users and other businesses.

In a hashtag challenge, a user challenges others to make and post a particular sort of video and to tag them using a specific hashtag. These are often dancing or lip syncing challenges, but could also be something like making a particular recipe.

There are usually lots of different hashtag challenges floating around at the same time, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find one which is relevant, and to get involved.

If there is a hashtag challenge in your niche, it’s important to join in straightaway (before the trend is over) and show your take on it. Your brand and personality will help you to stand out from others taking part in the challenge.

Have a go at a few, then consider creating your own. Start small by challenging a handful of users to tackle your #hashtagchallenge. If they have fun doing it and challenge a few of their friends to try it too, it can easily snowball.

Suddenly people who have never even heard of your brand before are engaging with it because you’ve challenged them to show you their office organising tips.



Children and animals

They say to never work with children and animals because they always cause chaos. On TikTok, that sort of chaos is positively encouraged. Children and animals provide just the level of cuteness, fun and unpredictability that TikTok users are looking for.

So get your children and your pets involved – and see if your team want to get theirs involved too. The more the merrier! 

Don’t forget to use a relevant hashtag on your videos like #dogsoftiktok – which users search for when they’re looking for a cute puppy to put a smile on their faces.



Work with influencers

Just as there are influencers on Instagram, there are also influencers on TikTok. Some of them are celebrities, but there are also plenty of normal people who have built up a large following on TikTok.

TikTok influencers will have different niches and different follower numbers, meaning different levels of influence.

As a brand, you can approach relevant TikTok influencers to propose a working partnership to help improve your own following. Obviously it is important that they are relevant to your brand, so a beauty influencer wouldn’t be a good fit for an educational brand, even if they do have a really good following.

Some ways an influencer may promote your brand include:

• Using your product in a video
• Talking about your product in a video
• Linking to your brand in the video description
• Posting about the brand in the description

Generally, the more followers they have, the more expensive they will be. But if you find an influencer working in the right niche whose personality is a good fit with your brand’s values, there is potential for a really good return on investment.

As TikTok is still relatively new, working with a TikTok influencer is likely to work out cheaper than working with an Instagram influencer and will be more effective at reaching the Gen Z market.



Use TikTok advertising

While TikTok is mainly about the organic reach, it is also possible to use paid advertising on the app. There are a number of advertising options, which offer precise targeting, so you can make sure your ads are reaching the users who would be interested in your products or services.

As it is still a relatively new tool, advertising on TikTok is a good option for companies which want to reach the 16-24 market and to grow their brand on a platform that isn’t yet overrun by competitors.

The four current ways to advertise on TikTok are:

• Turning your existing hashtag challenges into promoted content, so they reach more people.
• TikTok branded lenses, which are similar to the effects on Snapchat, and Instagram and give users a way to interact with a brand by playing with their filter, making them more aware of the brand and its products.
• In-feed video advertising - videos of up to 15 seconds which appear whilst users explore posted content.
• A brand takeover could put your business in front of potentially millions of users. It is a full-screen ad which is displayed when the user first opens the app, so is very hard to ignore!

Get a TikTok pro account

Anyone can use a TikTok pro account and it is important that you use one right from the start.

A pro account is helpful to track TikTok analytics and see what sort of content appeals to users and what doesn’t work as well. It will also give you insight into things like when your audience is most active, to help you work out the best time to post.

If you want to make TikTok work for your business, the key thing to remember is that, unlike your blog and other areas of the web, there is no evergreen content. TikTok is constantly changing and evolving and it is essential to move with the trends. If you can create your own trends, that’s even better!



Always stay focused on your audience and what they want to see, keep looking for inspiration, keep creating and keep posting, and you can make TikTok work for your business.