8 tips for growing your brand on TikTok

TikTok entered the social media market in 2016 and by the end of 2021 is expected to have more than 1 billion active users.

Aussies have found new ways to build creative careers, and brands are finding a breath of fresh air by tapping into a new marketing medium.

Whether it’s a Zoom mishap, a viral dance challenge or even a funny moment caught on camera, by now you probably know someone (or someone who knows someone) who has had a video blow up on TikTok.

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The For You page is a showcase for creators. It has enabled a new breed of influencer the opportunity to reach millions of people via a single video.

For brands - big or small - opportunities are ripe in the golden era of this platform.

Here are eight ways you can grow your brand or account or TikTok.

How TikTok videos go viral

Tik-Tok seems to use a "view" tier system. If your video meets a threshold of a certain amount of likes, comments, re-watches or shares, your video gets pushed to a larger pool of people.

For example, if your video gets 2,000 views and the engagement and reception is positive from that small sample size, the video will then go out to 10,000 people, and so on.

Incentivising comments

To incentivise comments on his videos to get more views, TikTok star Adam Milardovic from Melbourne - who has 4.7 million followers on the platform and gets more than 100 million views a month - says: “In my videos I have someone in the background wear one shoe or drop their phone, not as the focus of my video, but just as something random in the background, which opens people to commenting on it. This works really well.”

Quality over quantity

Most people will debate that posting multiple videos a day will increase your chances of one going viral. However the approach influencers such as Hunter Reilly (550,000 followers) take is to focus on posting just once a day and put emphasis on the quality of that content.

“My current approach to creating content is by simply asking the question, how can this be the best piece I make today,” Reilly said.

Be consistent

Regardless if you are posting once a day or twice a week, most of the success comes with consistency and the platform prefers that.

If you take breaks, you’re potentially hurting your momentum score and impacting on the success of future videos.

Test what performs

Content creation is a very simple process of trial and error. The chances of hitting the nail on the head the first time are unlikely, but don’t get discouraged, this is all just a game of test, rinse, repeat.

My preferred method is to test a wide range of videos and analyse the engagement, watch time and comments of each.

Some will do better than others, it’s your job to figure out why and action those changes in future content.

The first second

The first few seconds of any video will either make it or break it. The attention span of a TikTok viewer is short, so to avoid them scrolling on to the next video you need to grab their attention.

A creator such as Morgan Hipworth (880,000 followers) who makes cooking content, starts his videos at the end to show the finished product then works backwards to show how it was made.

It's all to grab the viewer's attention, and it works amazingly well.

Influencer collaborations

As a brand, partnering with an influencer to help create content for your brand’s page might be a lucrative relationship and help grow your reach.

With every collaboration my brand pays for, we like to duet all of our influencer videos to create an extra piece of content and help maximise the results from the original video.

A duet is when you record a video that follows along with another person's video.

The momentum score

When your videos begin to start performing or you have something go viral, it is very important to make sure your following videos also do well.

As part of their algorithm, TikTok seems to have a momentum score.

If five of your videos do well then the sixth is almost guaranteed to do well or at least will skip the first few view tiers that were discussed earlier.

In the long term, this stacks up, growing a very healthy channel.

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