All over the world, including in Quebec, TikTok continues to grow in popularity. After its resounding success in 2020, especially during the pandemic, you might be considering using it to promote your business. Before venturing into TikTok, make sure you really know what it is and how to make the best use of it.
TikTok in a nutshell
Since you must be familiar with the name of this app after repeatedly seeing it online in the past few months, how would you describe this social media platform called TikTok?
Created in 2016, this video-sharing social platform allows its users to get creative by sharing videos with a maximum length of 15 seconds on a subject of their choice. The ability to easily add songs and visual effects to the videos offers limitless creative possibilities.
More than any other video-sharing social network thus far — such as the now extinct app Vines — TikTok has conquered the short-video market. The estimated number of active users globally exceeds 1 billion.
We previously lightly touched on this topic in another blog, The 5 Key Social Media Trends to Watch in 2021. In 2020, TikTok saw explosive growth and a lot of social influence marketing opportunities emerged from this growth.
In brief, this article discussed the viral aspect of TikTok with the example of a user called @420doggface208 and the famous video in which we see a man skateboarding while drinking Ocean Spray cranberry juice directly from the bottle. This short video received more than 12.6 million likes and brought him many partnerships offers from several brands.
Who are TikTok’s users?
The excitement about TikTok is mostly among users age 16 to 24, meaning it’s a go-to social media for Gen Z. Both the creative and interactive aspect seem to be particularly appealing to young users.
Although TikTok’s original popularity was with young people, it has also been adopted by older users who were first attracted by seeing how it excited their children (and even grandchildren!). Today, users of all ages connect with others by doing challenges on this platform and interacting with its ever-increasing number of users.
Doing social influence marketing with TikTok
Apart from the possibility of advertising through videos pushed in users’ regular feed, there are far more innovative marketing strategies that will help you get more engagement from consumers.
Before starting a social influencer marketing campaign on TikTok, you must know what and who you are dealing with. Is TikTok the right fit for your product and for the message you wish to convey to the targeted audience? If the answer is yes, it’s important to develop a list of influencers and micro-influencers with a positive engagement among your target audience that can potentially influence your customers’ purchasing decisions.
When partnering with influencers, brands should keep the three following objectives in mind:
- a high engagement rate (likes, comments, shares and views)
- positive sentiment towards the brand (brand mentions and content created by users)
- a conversion rate (purchases, downloads, subscriptions, etc.)
If you are having trouble navigating the wide range of possibilities TikTok has to offer in terms of social influence marketing, you don’t have to do this alone! Our team of social marketing experts can help you develop strategies adapted to TikTok or any other social media platform. Don’t hesitate to contact us.