My Secret TikTok Life

The question of the day for social media marketers is will TikTok be banned in the United States or be bought? As a social media marketer, I’ve been wondering if our company should be on it. I decided to give TikTok a try to see if it would be a good fit for us. Initially, I kept this experiment to myself because I wasn’t sure if TikTok was a social media platform our company should even be on, let alone me. Let me tell you about my secret TikTok life.

Timing is everything right? Back in June when I hopped onto TikTok, it was the week everyone was saying to get off and delete it because the Chinese government was spying on us through the app. That freaked me out at first until I thought about it. Google, Facebook and Amazon know more about me than I would like, but I’m on at least one of them every day.

Figuring out the platform before I put our company on it was key to this experiment. I created an account and just consumed the content for a couple of weeks to see how it worked.

I quickly learned that TikTok was much more than dance videos. The three types of content that had the most success either entertained, educated or motivated. The next step in my experiment was to post videos. But what to post? It had to be content I already knew about. I went with the educational route and started posting random tips and life hacks. Once I began posting, it morphed into sharing tips on manners that I had learned over the years and had taught my kids. This topic seemed to resonate with TikTok users and my follower count grew.

Something happened after I hit 500 followers. One of the videos started to get a lot of views, likes and comments. Once this happened my follower count went up quickly. Evidently, the content of that video struck a nerve in people on both sides of the issue. Who knew that the topic of manners could be so polarizing? The types of comments changed. I loved getting comments that agreed with me or supported my message. It was another thing to read the comments from people who did not agree. Some of them were just mean and I had to learn to be comfortable with judgment. 

Lessons learned: 

When I received a comment on a video I would like it or comment back to test the level of engagement people had on the platform. FYI – it’s huge! If a comment was on the snarky side I would hop on over to their profile to see what they were about. I was surprised to learn that some of my biggest bullies on TikTok were from the “anti-bully” generation. These people who grew up hearing anti-bully messages in school said some of the most hateful things. My skin got thicker real fast.

On the flip side of that, I encountered some of the nicest, kindest people through the comments and questions posted on my videos. It warmed my heart when they would come to my defense against the bullies. The idea of standing up to a virtual bully is not as difficult as standing up to a bully on the playground but you’re still putting yourself out there. My followers were grateful to learn what I was sharing and they were taking a stand against the trolls.

Right now, the TikTok algorithm is very generous to smaller content creators. My account went from 1000 followers to almost 15,000 in two weeks. The more content I posted the quicker the it grew. Eventually, I was invited to apply for the TikTok Creator Fund which pays creators based on their views and other metrics. As of this writing I have about 87,000 followers. I post the same content on Instagram using the same hashtags and have 61 followers.

The original reason I got on TikTok was to see if it would be a good platform for our business to expand to on social media. It’s definitely a growing platform that our target audience is starting to migrate to, based on the analytics from my account. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to engage with a new audience.

Things to consider:

The platform still has an issue that makes it a challenge to manage multiple accounts. It allows for only one account to be associated with a cell phone number. Which means that you can’t private message people within the app if that phone number is already linked to a different account. Unlike Instagram, which allows you to have multiple accounts on the same phone for private messaging purposes.  I’m hoping the TikTok developers will rethink that and allow multiple accounts on the same phone. 

TikTok is global and our business is local. There’s great potential to reach a global audience but what about our local audience. I see the value in getting on there now, when it’s still relatively early, and claiming our turf. As our audience migrates to the platform, ideally, we would have already established our business as an industry authority. Plus, I believe the age demographics will continue to trend up to be more in line with our customer avatars.

The time required to create content for another social media platform is always a consideration when we expand our strategy. Plus, the amount of time it takes to respond and engage with followers is another factor.  Currently, my TikTok takes me about an hour a day just to respond to comments. That doesn’t include content creation or research time. I need to decide if our company could realistically handle the extra time required to strategize, create and analyze on one more social media platform. This is something I’m going to have to give serious thought to before I commit our brand.

The verdict:

Right now, I think brands that embrace TikTok and provide content that users want will have much more success than they’re getting on some of the other social media platforms. I’m guessing a lot of companies are in a wait and see mode. They don’t want to invest the time and money on a platform that may go away.

If TikTok does get banned in the U.S., our other social media platforms will still be in place. My thought is that TikTok is way cooler than the others and if it does get sold to a U.S. company brands will be jumping on it right away.