HOW TO GO VIRAL ON TIKTOK
TikTok is a platform that most brands will be considering as part of their 2021 marketing strategy. Understanding how the app works, from building a valuable following to learning how to go viral on TikTok, is something that we’ve been exploring for some time now at Sociably. So if you’d like to learn more about what’s required to achieve meaningful TikTok growth in 2021, here’s an overview of our findings to date.
TikTok growth Q&A with Dom and Louis
Dom: We’re here to chat a little bit more today about how to go viral on TikTok. In the last episode, if you listened to that, we were chatting more generally about the platform – whether it’s something that luxury brands should be looking at for marketing. I think we came to the conclusion that you can’t ignore it and now is the time to start focusing on increasing your TikTok follower count.
Louis: If you watch and listen to the previous episode, you’ll realise you definitely can’t ignore it but a lot of brands are still not sure how to use TikTok effectively.
“You can’t ignore TikTok for marketing”
Dom: That is the takeaway from our last article – you can’t ignore TikTok for marketing. So today, we’re going to talk in a bit more detail about growing a TikTok account and how to use TikTok as an effective marketing channel for your brand. So we’re going to do a few different podcasts talking about using TikTok for marketing and TikTok influencer marketing.
“Getting started on TikTok is easy”
Today we want to talk about how easy it is to start a TikTok account, how quickly you can grow versus how quickly you can grow on Instagram and how quickly you used to be able to grow on Instagram versus now. And we’ve got some kind of cool case studies we discussed in the last episode that explain a bit how to go viral on TikTok.
Louis: In the previous podcast we talked about how we really wanted to experience TikTok; create an account and grow it ourselves to see how quickly you can grow a TikTok following that you can use as an exposure page, or an influencer marketing page. Also, to see how the TikTok algorithm works and what engagement is like and how the engagement compares with Instagram.
“Understanding how the TikTok algorithm works”
Again, if you’re joining now, I think what’s key to mention, is our strategy from the beginning. When we joined it was around the time of the Geneva Motor Show last year, so it must have been March or April 2018.
Dom: Yeah so it was vertical video content that we got out of the motor show wasn’t it? It was the perfect type of content to use on TikTok.
“The first step to getting your video to go viral on TikTok”
Louis: Then we started to grow different TikTok accounts and noticed that the engagement from the very beginning of TikTok to now has seen a similar curve to Instagram’s growth. In the early days of Instagram it was possible to get on the ‘Explore’ page. It’s similar now with TikTok – it’s a bit easier to appear on the equivalent of the Instagram ‘Explore’ page – the ‘For You page‘ on TikTok. This is the first step to getting your video to go viral on TikTok. Obviously because there are fewer people on the platform and if you can create relevant content to a niche audience then you have a better chance of your content being shared to a larger audience. It’s a bit more difficult now that the TikTok app has become more popular, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get a video going viral or that you can’t grow it significantly within three months. We often tell clients that it isn’t too late to start using TikTok. Yes, last year was probably the best time to post on TikTok to really be ahead of the competition, but it’s still not a very saturated market.
“You can still grow your account quickly”
People often ask us how to get followers on TikTok. Well, it’s still possible to grow from 0 to 40k followers in a short space of time. This is why TikTok for marketing is going to become more and more relevant over the coming years, for both mainstream brands and luxury brands.
Dom: We had the approach, a bit like we had with Instagram, that if we’re going to talk about TikTok marketing, we need to know how to increase our own TikTok follower count and how to make it work ourselves before we can take it to any clients. That was kind of our approach with our TikTok marketing experiments – let’s grow some pages, let’s see if we can make it work, let’s get some data to see the type of content that engages on TikTok and what the key ingredients are to TikTok growth.
“The key ingredients are to TikTok growth”
Louis: We started experimenting with TikTok as a marketing channel just before Christmas 2019. It was already, in a way, quite late to be on the platform and not exactly the best time to post on TikTok. Bust as specialists in luxury marketing and influencer marketing we wanted to test TikTok to see if it could be relevant, especially for our clients. Could it work for automotive marketing, fashion marketing, hotel marketing and even property marketing? Could these types of brands get likes on TikTok?
“There’s also a more mature audience on there”
Dom: TikTok has faced some criticism which is why some brands aren’t sure whether it’s will work as a marketing channel. We’re often asked by brands things like ‘is TikTok just lots of teenagers dancing and lip synching?’ It is a lot of that but there’s also a more mature audience on there.
Louis: It is a lot of that but again, like we said, even though you have probably 70% of people on TikTok doing a lot of dancing and lip synching and all of that, there’s still the other 30% you can’t ignore.
Dom: Yes, 30% that are aged 25 and up who are very relevant to brands and this is really why we’re focused on Sociably being one of the first luxury agencies to provide TikTok marketing strategy and advice.
Louis: For us as a social media agency we needed to spend time discovering more about the platform and consuming the content ourselves. With this knowledge we are then in a better position to understand what works and specifically how to go viral on TikTok.
“Gen Z are the future target demographic”
Dom: We’ve discovered that the audience is there – 30% of TikTok users are in the millennial (and above) demographic. This is a valuable audience for most luxury brands. Plus, we should not forget about Gen Z who are very active on TikTok and are ultimately the future target demographic. TikTok is the perfect place to start nurturing these brand relationships early.
At the moment it’s about working the TikTok algorithm so that you create the type of content that your target audience want to see and. The theory is that TikTok will then put this content in front of them. Then for the younger audiences that aren’t so interested, it won’t resonate with them anyway and so it won’t go viral. So it’s about finding the content for that niche in order to get more likes on TikTok. This should be a key part of any TikTok marketing strategy.
“How do you grow a following on TikTok?”
Louis: We’ve found creating relevant content that leverages the best TikTok hashtags is key. You also need to post a lot on TikTok – two to three times a day, minimum. Brands should also think about how to stay relevant to their audience by thinking what they’re here for and what they’re willing to see. Also listening to your audience; through that we discovered that our TikTok followers were really keen on a particular destination and wanted to learn more about that destination. For example they wanted to know the exact locations of where to go and where to find certain things. This is exciting for the tourism and hospitality sectors! It’s about listening to the comments from your followers, engaging with them and trying to tailor your TikTok videos to them even more so that you can really speak to that audience and be receptive to it.
“Listen to the comments from your followers”
It’s not necessarily about having a large number of followers on TikTok. If you manage to create a great video that leverages current trends and the best TikTok hashtags you can really get the most out of the algorithm and suddenly you’re appearing on the For You page. This is really how to go viral on TikTok – if you get these ingredients right you can get your content seen by an audience far beyond your own followers. Getting a viral video will also really help to increase your visibility and in turn this will help with your TikTok growth.
“TikTok has really democratised social media and that’s exciting”
Dom: Even if you’re looking from a brand perspective or an influencer perspective, there is an opportunity to grow really quickly as you could back in 2011/2012 Instagram. Social media is a powerful tool for brands of all sizes and using TikTok for marketing is an opportunity you shouldn’t ignore.
Louis: Yes and we have tested it. So through our destination page – we tested it a bit to see if you could bring in a bit of car content and a bit of premium watch content. We found that it just didn’t engage that well. This has a lot to do with the way TikTok categorises content and why finding your niche is a key part of any TikTok marketing strategy.
“Find your niche on TikTok”
Dom: It’s the same on a car focused TikTok page – we’ve trialled this on large car pages that contain predominantly interior shots of cars. If you put up something about a hotel, it just won’t engage. This is really interesting and which I don’t think would happen on Instagram as much.
Louis: No, probably not as much. I don’t know if it’s a case of the audience directly not engaging from the beginning and the algorithm not picking up on it or pushing that specific video. Or, is it that the engagement you get on a video sort of sticks and resonates with your niche, then TikTok puts you in a category and therefore anything that is outside that category won’t engage. I think it’s a bit of a mixture of both.
So if you’re trying to grow a TikTok account – if you’re a brand thinking, shall we? Shall we not? Do we start TikTok? Should we run TikTok ads? You need to consider a few things, like the consistency and production of the content. It doesn’t need to be like Instagram marketing, where sometimes the content has to be edited and tailored slightly more – it can be a bit more raw and authentic. But you still need to put up a lot of content and spend time on it and really stay focused on your audience and your niche and not really go out of that. So from the beginning, you need to literally sign off and say ‘I’m going to stick to that strategy’ if you want to grow significantly.
“There’s an opportunity from the outset to do this on TikTok.”
Dom: That’s great advice. I think, if you’re a brand, and you’re luxury specialists, where you can pin exactly what your mission is about, then there’s an opportunity from the outset to do this on TikTok.
Louis: A couple of weeks ago they also introduced the URL which is a massive game changer for marketing on TikTok and will have a big impact for TikTok influencer marketing.
The second thing is that at the moment it’s difficult to find relevant people to follow on TikTok which makes influencer casting more challenging. For example, if you’re a luxury fashion brand, you’ve got to find the right influencer that will talk nicely about your product and feature your product; this is probably easier to find on Instagram. This is because what you’ve viewed is then suggested more in your feed, and basically based on the algorithm picking up on what you’ve been watching and liking and engaging with over the past week, to then push whatever seems to be relevant.
Dom: Adding the URL is a big factor for TikTok but for influencers on TikTok to be really effective we really need to see some sort of swipe up functionality. As an influencer marketing agency we need this data in order to measure our KPIs – we need to be to say ‘Okay, we’re going to send someone from an influencer page to your website’.
“How long does it take to grow on TikTok?”
Realistically, how long is it going to take you to get to 10k followers and then 20k TikTok followers?
Louis: I mean, here we’re being completely transparent, we have all the data from our tests. We literally did an exercise before Christmas where we decided to monitor and video screen everything we were doing on TikTok marketing campaigns. So you see everything – for example, how the account has grown, how many new followers we’ve received and if any of our videos have gone viral. For example, we have one account where we’ve screenshot the progress from zero followers to around 5k followers in 7 days. So we managed to grow that account from 0 to 5k within a week by posting, on average, 3 to 5 videos a day – quite a lot! The more you post, especially at the beginning, the more likely one of the videos might go viral and help your growth. This is probably why brands will need help producing TikTok videos and also TikTok community management.
Dom: Yes, the demands of TikTok are daily and it really is always on! If its isn’t then you risk opportunities to leverage trending hashtags that could potentially help to make your TikTok video go viral.
“Post multiple times a day!”
Louis: I’m not saying it’s a fool-proof science, because another page where we also started from scratch took longer to grow, but there are definitely trends that we can follow when putting together an effective TikTok growth strategy.
Dom: I think that the platform gives you a bit of a chance in those first few posts by putting them out to a wider audience. So if one of those videos is a good bit of content, that you notice has got that viral nature to it, you’re in a good place. So if you waste that opportunity at the start, it’s quite hard to come back again. Get that right and that’s how to go viral on TikTok.
Louis: If you manage to get a video with high views early on then you should take that specific video that went viral and try to do something very similar as you now know that style of content is working well within your niche.
“TikTok is a massive marketing opportunity for brands”
Dom: If you look at the number of views you can get from a good viral TikTok video and compare it with other platforms like Instagram or YouTube, you’ll see why it’s a massive marketing opportunity. If you’re a small, young, medium sized brand and you’re thinking, ‘Okay, are we going to do a bit of everything? Or are we going to nail one thing?’. You’ve got to seriously consider TikTok and whether you should go all in on this and make it the centre of your social media marketing strategy. However, leave it too late and TikTok growth will undoubtedly become far more difficult.
Louis: I think we’ve mentioned this in previous articles, but I think if you were to start a platform today, you’d mainly think about Facebook and maybe Twitter. But if you’re like ‘Okay, I need to be more 2020’ and be on the latest platforms that millennials engage with, then you think about Instagram, which is an obvious one, and also about TikTok, which you have more of a chance with than Instagram now and is more relevant to Gen Z. However, lots of people, even people who have a big following on TikTok keep pushing their Instagrams through TikTok, and so driving that traffic back to Instagram. They’re focusing time, money and energy to create content on TikTok, nailing their TikTok marketing and growing this platform quite quickly, to then use this platform to drive the audience back to their Instagram.
“Share exclusive content on TikTok”
Dom: Yeah, that collateral benefit makes a lot of sense.
Louis: Again, it’s similar with a YouTube audience, they can ask ‘why would I follow you on Instagram as well as this platform?’. So why would I go on TikTok just to be redirected to another platform? You have to make it attractive for them to be redirected from TikTok to Instagram. So maybe you could show more behind the scenes on the Instagram page or vice versa. So for a photo on Instagram you could go and check out all the behind the scenes on TikTok and see how we spent like 10 hours to get that shot.
“It’s about having a unique approach”
Dom: That’s an added value of TikTok as a marketing channel – it’s not just the same thing repeated – just sharing content repurposed on TikTok isn’t a great social media marketing strategy and as we’ve seen, doesn’t actually work. So it’s about having a unique approach to both platforms.
We’re going to talk a lot more about TikTok, TikTok influencer marketing and TikTok marketing in general over the coming weeks and months. We’ll talk about some other pages that we’ve built. The challenges we faced, as well as other things, obviously about our specialism – luxury marketing on TikTok.
Louis: Yeah we’re just having a conversation here and hopefully this has provided some answers to how to go viral on TikTok. Again, our approach as a social media agency is focusing on testing platforms ourselves before advising our clients. For us it’s important to be able to tell our client ‘we’ve been through this and we’re doing it on a daily basis’. It’s the same with Instagram influencer marketing. We have years of experience in influencer marketing and we know how to approach it and we’re in a good position to advise brands on the right creative strategy to employ.
TikTok growth Q&A with Dom and Louis
Dom: We’re here to chat a little bit more today about how to go viral on TikTok. In the last episode, if you listened to that, we were chatting more generally about the platform. Whether it’s something that luxury brands should be looking at for marketing. We came to the conclusion that you can’t ignore it and now is the time to start focusing on increasing your TikTok follower count.
Louis: If you watch and listen to the previous episode, you’ll realise you definitely can’t ignore it but a lot of brands are still not sure how to use TikTok effectively.
“You can’t ignore TikTok for marketing”
Dom: That is the takeaway from our last article. You can’t ignore TikTok for marketing. So today, we’re going to talk in a bit more detail about growing a TikTok account and how to use TikTok as an effective marketing channel for your brand. So we’re going to do a few different podcasts talking about using TikTok for marketing and TikTok influencer marketing. Today we want to talk about how easy it is to start a TikTok account. How quickly you can grow versus how quickly you can grow on Instagram. Plus how quickly you used to be able to grow on Instagram versus now. And we’ve got some cool case studies that explain how to go viral on TikTok.
“We’ve gathered a lot of data already”
Louis: In the previous podcast we talked about how we really wanted to experience TikTok. Create an account and grow it ourselves to see how quickly you can grow a TikTok following that you can use as an exposure page, or an influencer marketing page. Also, to see how the TikTok algorithm works and what engagement is like and how the engagement compares with Instagram.
Again, if you’re joining now, I think what’s key to mention, is our strategy from the beginning. When we joined it was around the time of the Geneva Motor Show last year, so it must have been March or April 2018.
Dom: Yeah so it was vertical video content that we got out of the motor show wasn’t it? It was the perfect type of content to use on TikTok.
“The first step to getting your video to go viral on TikTok”
Louis: Then we started to grow different TikTok accounts and noticed that the engagement from the very beginning of TikTok to now has seen a similar curve to Instagram’s growth. In the early days of Instagram it was possible to get on the ‘Explore’ page. It’s similar now with TikTok – it’s a bit easier to appear on the equivalent of the Instagram ‘Explore’ page – the ‘For You page’ on TikTok. This is the first step to getting your video to go viral on TikTok. Obviously because there are fewer people on the platform and if you can create relevant content to a niche audience then you have a better chance of your content being shared to a larger audience. It’s a bit more difficult now that the TikTok app has become more popular, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get a video going viral or that you can’t grow it significantly within three months. We often tell clients that it isn’t too late to start using TikTok. Yes, last year was probably the best time to post on TikTok to really be ahead of the competition, but it’s still not a very saturated market.
“You want to get on the For You Page”
People often ask us how to get followers on TikTok. Well, it’s still possible to grow from 0 to 40k followers in a short space of time. This is why TikTok for marketing is going to become more and more relevant over the coming years, for both mainstream brands and luxury brands.
Dom: We had the approach, a bit like we had with Instagram, that if we’re going to talk about TikTok marketing, we need to know how to increase our own TikTok follower count and how to make it work ourselves before we can take it to any clients. That was kind of our approach with our TikTok marketing experiments – let’s grow some pages, let’s see if we can make it work, let’s get some data to see the type of content that engages on TikTok and what the key ingredients are to TikTok growth.
Louis: We started experimenting with TikTok as a marketing channel just before Christmas 2019. It was already, in a way, quite late to be on the platform and not exactly the best time to post on TikTok. Bust as specialists in luxury marketing and influencer marketing we wanted to test TikTok to see if it could be relevant, especially for our clients. Could it work for automotive marketing, fashion marketing, hotel marketing and even property marketing? Could these types of brands get likes on TikTok?
“There’s also a more mature audience on there”
Dom: TikTok has faced some criticism which is why some brands aren’t sure whether it’s will work as a marketing channel. We’re often asked by brands things like ‘is TikTok just lots of teenagers dancing and lip synching?’ It is a lot of that but there’s also a more mature audience on there.
Louis: It is a lot of that but again, like we said, even though you have probably 70% of people on TikTok doing a lot of dancing and lip synching and all of that, there’s still the other 30% you can’t ignore.
Dom: Yes, 30% that are aged 25 and up who are very relevant to brands and this is really why we’re focused on Sociably being one of the first luxury agencies to provide TikTok marketing strategy and advice.
Louis: For us as a social media agency we needed to spend time discovering more about the platform and consuming the content ourselves. With this knowledge we are then in a better position to understand what works and specifically how to go viral on TikTok.
“Gen Z are the future target demographic”
Dom: We’ve discovered that the audience is there – 30% of TikTok users are in the millennial (and above) demographic. This is a valuable audience for most luxury brands. Plus, we should not forget about Gen Z who are very active on TikTok and are ultimately the future target demographic. TikTok is the perfect place to start nurturing these brand relationships early.
At the moment it’s about working the TikTok algorithm so that you create the type of content that your target audience want to see and. The theory is that TikTok will then put this content in front of them. Then for the younger audiences that aren’t so interested, it won’t resonate with them anyway and so it won’t go viral. So it’s about finding the content for that niche in order to get more likes on TikTok. This should be a key part of any TikTok marketing strategy.
“How do you grow a following on TikTok?”
Louis: We’ve found creating relevant content that leverages the best TikTok hashtags is key. You also need to post a lot on TikTok – two to three times a day, minimum. Brands should also think about how to stay relevant to their audience by thinking what they’re here for and what they’re willing to see. Also listening to your audience; through that we discovered that our TikTok followers were really keen on a particular destination and wanted to learn more about that destination. For example they wanted to know the exact locations of where to go and where to find certain things. This is exciting for the tourism and hospitality sectors! It’s about listening to the comments from your followers, engaging with them and trying to tailor your TikTok videos to them even more so that you can really speak to that audience and be receptive to it.
It’s not necessarily about having a large number of followers on TikTok. If you manage to create a great video that leverages current trends and the best TikTok hashtags you can really get the most out of the algorithm and suddenly you’re appearing on the For You page. This is really how to go viral on TikTok – if you get these ingredients right you can get your content seen by an audience far beyond your own followers. Getting a viral video will also really help to increase your visibility and in turn this will help with your TikTok growth.
“TikTok has really democratised social media and that’s exciting”
Dom: Even if you’re looking from a brand perspective or an influencer perspective, there is an opportunity to grow really quickly as you could back in 2011/2012 Instagram. Social media is a powerful tool for brands of all sizes and using TikTok for marketing is an opportunity you shouldn’t ignore.
Louis: Yes and we have tested it. So through our destination page – we tested it a bit to see if you could bring in a bit of car content and a bit of premium watch content. We found that it just didn’t engage that well. This has a lot to do with the way TikTok categorises content and why finding your niche is a key part of any TikTok marketing strategy.
Dom: It’s the same on a car focused TikTok page – we’ve trialled this on large car pages that contain predominantly interior shots of cars. If you put up something about a hotel, it just won’t engage. This is really interesting and which I don’t think would happen on Instagram as much.
“TikTok content can be less polished”
Louis: No, probably not as much. I don’t know if it’s a case of the audience directly not engaging from the beginning and the algorithm not picking up on it or pushing that specific video. Or, is it that the engagement you get on a video sort of sticks and resonates with your niche, then TikTok puts you in a category and therefore anything that is outside that category won’t engage. I think it’s a bit of a mixture of both.
So if you’re trying to grow a TikTok account – if you’re a brand thinking, shall we? Shall we not? Do we start TikTok? Should we run TikTok ads? You need to consider a few things, like the consistency and production of the content. It doesn’t need to be like Instagram marketing, where sometimes the content has to be edited and tailored slightly more – it can be a bit more raw and authentic. But you still need to put up a lot of content and spend time on it and really stay focused on your audience and your niche and not really go out of that. So from the beginning, you need to literally sign off and say ‘I’m going to stick to that strategy’ if you want to grow significantly.
“Should you run TikTok ads?”
Dom: That’s great advice. I think, if you’re a brand, and you’re luxury specialists, where you can pin exactly what your mission is about, then there’s an opportunity from the outset to do this on TikTok.
Louis: A couple of weeks ago they also introduced the URL which is a massive game changer for marketing on TikTok and will have a big impact for TikTok influencer marketing.
The second thing is that at the moment it’s difficult to find relevant people to follow on TikTok which makes influencer casting more challenging. For example, if you’re a luxury fashion brand, you’ve got to find the right influencer that will talk nicely about your product and feature your product; this is probably easier to find on Instagram. This is because what you’ve viewed is then suggested more in your feed, and basically based on the algorithm picking up on what you’ve been watching and liking and engaging with over the past week, to then push whatever seems to be relevant.
Dom: Adding the URL is a big factor for TikTok but for influencers on TikTok to be really effective we really need to see some sort of swipe up functionality. As an influencer marketing agency we need this data in order to measure our KPIs – we need to be to say ‘Okay, we’re going to send someone from an influencer page to your website’.
“How long does it take to grow on TikTok?”
Realistically, how long is it going to take you to get to 10k followers and then 20k TikTok followers?
Louis: I mean, here we’re being completely transparent, we have all the data from our tests. We literally did an exercise before Christmas where we decided to monitor and video screen everything we were doing on TikTok marketing campaigns. So you see everything – for example, how the account has grown, how many new followers we’ve received and if any of our videos have gone viral. For example, we have one account where we’ve screenshot the progress from zero followers to around 5k followers in 7 days. So we managed to grow that account from 0 to 5k within a week by posting, on average, 3 to 5 videos a day – quite a lot! The more you post, especially at the beginning, the more likely one of the videos might go viral and help your growth. This is probably why brands will need help producing TikTok videos and also TikTok community management.
“Post 3 to 5 videos a day”
Dom: Yes, the demands of TikTok are daily and it really is always on! If its isn’t then you risk opportunities to leverage trending hashtags that could potentially help to make your TikTok video go viral.
Louis: I’m not saying it’s a fool-proof science, because another page where we also started from scratch took longer to grow, but there are definitely trends that we can follow when putting together an effective TikTok growth strategy.
Dom: I think that the platform gives you a bit of a chance in those first few posts by putting them out to a wider audience. So if one of those videos is a good bit of content, that you notice has got that viral nature to it, you’re in a good place. So if you waste that opportunity at the start, it’s quite hard to come back again. Get that right and that’s how to go viral on TikTok.
Louis: If you manage to get a video with high views early on then you should take that specific video that went viral and try to do something very similar as you now know that style of content is working well within your niche.
“TikTok is a massive marketing opportunity for brands”
Dom: If you look at the number of views you can get from a good viral TikTok video and compare it with other platforms like Instagram or YouTube, you’ll see why it’s a massive marketing opportunity. If you’re a small, young, medium sized brand and you’re thinking, ‘Okay, are we going to do a bit of everything? Or are we going to nail one thing?’. You’ve got to seriously consider TikTok and whether you should go all in on this and make it the centre of your social media marketing strategy. However, leave it too late and TikTok growth will undoubtedly become far more difficult.
Louis: I think we’ve mentioned this in previous articles, but I think if you were to start a platform today, you’d mainly think about Facebook and maybe Twitter. But if you’re like ‘Okay, I need to be more 2020’ and be on the latest platforms that millennials engage with, then you think about Instagram, which is an obvious one, and also about TikTok, which you have more of a chance with than Instagram now and is more relevant to Gen Z.
“TikTok can help you grow your Instagram”
However, lots of people, even people who have a big following on TikTok keep pushing their Instagrams through TikTok, and so driving that traffic back to Instagram. They’re focusing time, money and energy to create content on TikTok, nailing their TikTok marketing and growing this platform quite quickly, to then use this platform to drive the audience back to their Instagram.
Dom: Yeah, that collateral benefit makes a lot of sense.
Louis: Again, it’s similar with a YouTube audience, they can ask ‘why would I follow you on Instagram as well as this platform?’. So why would I go on TikTok just to be redirected to another platform? You have to make it attractive for them to be redirected from TikTok to Instagram. So maybe you could show more behind the scenes on the Instagram page or vice versa. So for a photo on Instagram you could go and check out all the behind the scenes on TikTok and see how we spent like 10 hours to get that shot.
“It’s about having a unique approach”
Dom: That’s an added value of TikTok as a marketing channel – it’s not just the same thing repeated – just sharing content repurposed on TikTok isn’t a great social media marketing strategy and as we’ve seen, doesn’t actually work. So it’s about having a unique approach to both platforms.
We’re going to talk a lot more about TikTok, TikTok influencer marketing and TikTok marketing in general over the coming weeks and months. We’ll talk about some other pages that we’ve built. The challenges we faced, as well as other things, obviously about our specialism – luxury marketing on TikTok.
Louis: Yeah we’re just having a conversation here and hopefully this has provided some answers to how to go viral on TikTok. Again, our approach as a social media agency is focusing on testing platforms ourselves before advising our clients. For us it’s important to be able to tell our client ‘we’ve been through this and we’re doing it on a daily basis’. It’s the same with Instagram influencer marketing. We have years of experience in influencer marketing and we know how to approach it and we’re in a good position to advise brands on the right creative strategy to employ.
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