LEARN HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT INFLUENCERS
Already we’ve seen an abundance of brands testing this channel out for their influencer marketing campaigns. For example, media publication Washington Post hired a specialist TikTok app expert to run its account, fashion label ‘Guess’ used influencers for its first TikTok campaign and it’s metrics noted that it had over 42 billion views, and ‘Gymshark’ a sportswear company built an always – on TikTok content strategy and are now seeing the results in their number of followers – to the tune of 1.7 million followers on their account.
It can be a daunting experience for brands that are new to this type of digital marketing and social media platform. Whilst understanding target markets and your influencer campaigns on TikTok is one thing, the most important aspect is understanding the most effective way to achieve your goals and utilise the ever-growing influencer marketing platform as much as possible. With more and more micro-influencers existing on TikTok, there is a lot of potential for custom messaging too, as well as weaving it in with your other content marketing and outreach strategies.
So how can you WIN at TikTok and get the top influencers and content creators to create brand awareness for you? Easy, we’ve put together a simple guide to help you understand the trends and hashtags that will send your influencer marketing strategy and TikTok campaigns to the moon and back!
WHAT IS TIKTOK? 🤔
It started in 2014 with an app called musical.ly. Users were able to record clips of them lip-syncing to music, usually 15 seconds to one minute long. Within 2 years of launching the company had over 90 million users.
In late 2018, the app was acquired by ByteDance Ltd, a China-based Internet technology company. They merged musical.ly with TikTok.
TikTok is the breeding ground of today’s most permeating trends, memes, and dance routines and has seen exponentially big growth, with it now having over 800 million active users – at a quicker pace that Instagram.
The video app allows users to share short videos (max. 60 seconds) which feature music in the background, a range of filters and tools to help improve your video presentation and also a live-streaming option for its users.
Over the past year, TikTok has been responsible for the rise of several chart-topping hits, with the likes of Lil Nas X’s country jam, Old Town Road, having skyrocketed to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for 17 weeks, thanks to it having near 67 million plays on TikTok.
DUETS 🧑🤝🧑 WITH OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA USERS
If you are looking at using influencers to advertise on TikTok, duets are a great way to massively increase your maximum reach.
Duets are a core part of the TikTok experience, these allow users to create content featuring an additional video, which appears side by side on the screen, so they can be watched simultaneously in the app.
Duets open up more possibilities for user creativity. You can dance with a friend, an influencer, or show someone else mirroring your dance moves, and it is a great way for brands to upload videos and invite their community to join them on screen.
Duets can lead to some incredible results such as ‘duet chains’ and ‘viral trends’. Here’s an example of TikTok duets that went VIRAL.
HASHTAG#️⃣ CHALLENGE
Similarly, to social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, hashtags play a significant role in TikTok. They are the best way for users to find and share content and also where communities are built.
With the use of hashtags, creators and brands can spot emerging trends and understand which ones are dominating the platform.
They can be started by individuals, usually TikTokers, influencers with many followers, or also by brands who have invested in TikTok advertising.
With many brands and marketers new to the platform, a common misconception to make your brand go viral and run a successful campaign is by creating an original hashtag. However, ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS for brands to market to the TikTok community is by leveraging an existing hashtag.
Besides these significant benefits, hashtag challenges are a great way to collaborate with big TikTok influencers. These will also help your brand to get known and loved by the TikTok community and help create a large amount of organic traction through user-generated content.
In short, hashtags play a major role in TikTok, and hashtag challenges drive the most user engagement across the whole platform.
IN-FEED NATIVE ADS ON TIKTOK 📱
If your brand currently uses Instagram stories to advertise, then TikTok in-feed native ads are a great tool for you to use.
On the TikTok ads platform, you can access their family of apps, which covers multiple verticals, including entertainment, news, and content discovery apps. This enables you to find the users most suitable for your products based on your marketing goals.
The in-feed ad enables you to add website links and order now buttons to the ad itself, helping users to land on the page directly and support on the ROI with click-throughs.
The ads are skippable and have multiple options in the design overall. The usage of the advert can be traced by click-through rates, total views, video viewing time, engagements received, and impressions.
HOW DOES THE TIKTOK ALGORITHM WORK?
Similarly, to YouTube, you don’t have to be logged in or have a TikTok account to track what you’re watching.
When a video is uploaded, TikTok shows it to a small number of users in between popular trending videos. The algorithm then measures how much of your video is watched, as well as how many likes, comments, and shares it gets.
TikTok then tends to group related videos and recommends to those specific users who it thinks will enjoy them.
In essence, the algorithm is triggered by the velocity of the engagement it receives, this helps the best influencers get seen to a wider audience too.
Aside from this Tiktok also has a search and explore search engine function, similar to Instagram. This section is put together by TikTok and changes daily. The explore page is categorised by popular hashtags, featured creators, songs, and challenges.
HOW CAN TAKUMI HELP BY PARTNERING WITH YOUR TIKTOK MEDIA STRATEGY?
TAKUMI offers brands the opportunity to drive views at scale on TikTok. Our social media marketing team works with creators and potential influencers that have perfected the craft of maximising views authentically, ensuring relevant engagement to their type of content, and laying the foundations for future and continued collaboration with brands.
TAKUMI aims to leverage the creativity and light-hearted tone of TikTok, alongside TAKUMI’s exclusive pool of talent to help brands keep front of mind with consumers. Whether a new business, an ecommerce retailer or an established brand name, if you would like to find out more about creating a TikTok brand strategy, along with other social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more, contact Takumi today and we can help you connect with social media influencers today.”,