5 Things You Need to Know about Marketing on TikTok

TikTok may be the strange new kid on the social media block, but it’s also the most downloaded app on the planet—with over 1 billion app installs since its 2016 launch.

What’s even more impressive? More than 500 million people use TikTok each month, which beats out Twitter, SnapChat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. In other words, if I published a 13-second TikTok video of a cat clapping, it just might reach more people than this LinkedIn Pulse article.

Sorry, LinkedIn! Just keeping it real.

What does 500 million users mean for YOU as a marketer?

TikTok represents a powerful branding opportunity, but before you dive in, you’ll want to understand its culture, demographics, strengths, and limitations.

Here are five things you need to know about TikTok for marketing:

1. What is TikTok and how does it work?

2. TikTok for branding

3. Demographics: Who uses TikTok?

4. Creating content that fits the TikTok style

5. How to engage your audiences

1. What is TikTok and how does it work?

Created by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok initially took off with teens and is now catching on with other demographics.

TikTok is an app that allows users to take short video clips (15-seconds or less). They can string those clips together to make videos that run up to 60-seconds, and they can upload longer videos—but most of the content is pretty short.

What will you find on TikTok?  

TikTok content runs the gamut, although a good chunk of it tends toward the unapologetically weird.

Users take advantage of its wide range of filters, special-effects, sound-editing, and augmented reality tools to create clips like this Spiderman doll riding a greyhound. There’s also a fair bit of cosplay lip-syncing, as you’ll see in this ode to the underground (which uses TikTok’s “duet” feature).

You’ll also find people showing off some wild dance moves, and some TikTok creators even manage to tell a story in 15-seconds. And then there are some creators who make genuine works of art.

Oh, and here’s Will Smith.

Try it yourself

If all this leaves you scratching your head, wondering if you’re officially too old to understand Generation Z, try downloading the app and see it in action. It’s weirdly addictive, and the more clips you “like,” the smarter the system gets at figuring out what entertains you.

Download the app and start swiping… just try not to go too far down the rabbit hole!

Finding your way around

TikTok is pretty easy to navigate. Just download the app, open it, and the first video will start playing automatically. If you like what you see, tap the heart icon. And if you don’t like it? Just swipe up at any time to see a new video.

You’ll see additional icons that allow you to follow a particular creator, save a clip to your list of favorites, share a clip with people outside the system, leave a comment, and more. You can also search for content using keywords and hashtags.

There are two news feeds: one called “Following” and one called “For You.” You can select which feed you want to view by tapping on it at the top of the screen. The “Following” feed shows all the latest posts from TikTok creators you’ve chosen to follow, and the “For You” feed shows you videos that TikTok’s algorithm has selected for you based on your activity.

2. TikTok for branding

How can you use all this for marketing? 

Anytime you’ve got 500 million people scrolling through some surprisingly addictive content, you’ve got an opportunity to raise brand awareness. Here are a few examples…

Chipotle: Chipotle’s TikTok page has nearly 150,000 followers (at the time of publication). They not only post their own content, but they encourage people to use their hashtags to engage in challenges, like the #GuacDance challenge.

Based on a viral song about guacamole from a children’s entertainer, TikTok users created videos like this. Over six days, Chipotle’s #GuacDance challenge received a quarter-million submissions and 450,000 views on TikTok.

United Nations: The UN International Fund for Agricultural Development spearheaded a different kind of dance challenge—one that doubled as a petition to help end world hunger. The goal was to get global leaders to pay more attention to the health and agricultural needs of young people in developing countries, and #DanceForChange received 5,000 submissions and over 100 million views.

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon: Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show page has 1.4 million followers on TikTok, where he features clips from his show and puts forth various challenges. 

His first challenge was the #TumbleWeedChallenge, which received almost 1 million views. It encouraged Tonight Show viewers to stop, drop, and roll like a tumbleweed… for, uhhh, some reason?

Hey, I warned you! TikTok is a strange place.

3. Demographics: Who uses TikTok?

TikTok was once entirely dominated by teens, but that’s all starting to change. According to Marketing Charts, the number of monthly active adult TikTok users (18+) in the U.S. has increased 5.5 times between October 2017 and March 2019. Currently, there were over 14 million adults in the U.S. using TikTok regularly (more than half of the 26.5 million U.S users). 

That’s impressive growth for an 18-month period, and there’s no reason to believe it will stop anytime soon.

What else do you need to know?

Age Breakdown of Adult Users (18+) in the United States: Among adult users in the U.S., just over half are between the ages of 18-34, one third are between 35-54, and a little over 16% are in the 55+ cohort.

Gender: TikTok users are 56% male and 44% female (Source: Business of Apps, 2018)

Global Reach: TikTok is available in 155 countries and 75 different languages. There are 26.5 million regular TikTok users in the United States alone.

Time Spent on TikTok: The average regular user (those who log in at least once per month) spends 52 minutes per day on TikTok. 

4. Creating content that fits the TikTok style

Social media apps and websites each have their own culture. LinkedIn tends to be serious and professional, Instagram leans toward the inspirational, and TikTok tends to be raw, real, and most of the time it’s not overly produced (filters and special effects notwithstanding).

At the moment, some of the most successful TikTok videos made for businesses and organizations don’t feel like they were made on a $25,000 budget. Instead, take a look at this video from the Washington Post, which pokes fun of fair-weather sports fans. These sorts of easy-to-produce videos have earned them over 210,000 TikTok followers and millions of views.

Of course, there’s no hard-and-fast rule that TikTok videos can’t be fancy, but remember—people can see commercials for your brand by flipping on their TV or logging into Hulu. Instead, consider taking them behind the scenes and into your world, giving them a new perspective on your brand.

5. How to engage your audiences

TikTok doesn’t currently let you hyperlink posts to lead traffic to your website, so right now it’s all about branding. 

If you want TikTok users to remember your brand, you’ve got to get them engaged. There are three ways to do this: posting entertaining content, using hashtags, and running challenges.

Entertaining content: What people find entertaining is subjective, of course. Try different approaches and see what works. If it’s good stuff that people find funny, exciting, or interesting, you’re bound to get some attention. And if it’s really good, the love you get from strangers will boost your views, the attention will snowball, and you just may become the next TikTok star.

Hashtags: Click the search icon on the lower, left-hand corner, and then click on the “Hashtags” tab. There, you can see which hashtags are trending. You can then add some relevant hashtags to your post to get more exposure from people who are searching based on those topics.

Challenges: As discussed in more detail above, challenges are a powerful way to inspire people to engage your brand. Just pick a hashtag, tie it to your challenge, advertise the challenge, and see what your fellow TikTok users create.

Pro Tip: If you want to add music, consider using a music clip from TikTok’s “Sounds” library. When you use one of their clips (as opposed to adding your own music), people can search for videos based on those clips. When they do that, your video will get more exposure.

Also, some TikTok users speculate that the algorithm favors videos that use these sound clips, boosting your total views and increasing your chances of going viral.

What’s Next for TikTok?

Just like any emerging technology, TikTok is bound to change over the years. They will implement upgrades, and the culture will shift in response. Facebook once positioned itself as a way to reconnect with people we’ve met in the real world, but after Facebook Groups took off, Facebook users became more open to accepting friend requests from people they’d never met.

It’s impossible to say what direction TikTok will go, or how it will change as their demographics shift, but there’s one thing we know for sure. TikTok is a powerful new platform that has experienced a meteoric rise in under three years, and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

While other short-form video apps have had their day in the sun, TikTok appears to have come out on top. If you want to get in early and start building your presence on this promising new platform—ahead of your competitors—now is the time to strike.