What is TikTok (Social Platform) - How Do I Use It?

I'm not going to lie - TikTok has captured me completely. I’m having fun, using it for marketing, and growing a fun and raving following!

What is TikTok and should I be using it? 

I get this question all the time and I wanted to give you a birds eye view of TikTok because I know so many people don’t understand it at all.

TikTok is like a short form mobile video app. It is available ONLY on your phone. It is not available on a desktop. 

A great comparison of TikTok is to vine. It’s similar to Vine was like six seconds. TikTok is 15 seconds but can go up to 60 second videos. It is formerly the platform Music.ly, but they rebranded it as TikTok.

Who is on TikTok?

The interesting thing about TikTok is that people are growing very fast on this platform. Now you might be wondering, okay, but is it really what I hear it is “It's all for kids. Everyone is under the age of 13.”

 While there is some truth to it being a younger demographic on TikTok, the platform is actually in 154 different countries and its audience is only slightly younger. 

About 66% of its active users are under the age of 30. That means ? of its users are over 30! 

With over 500 million active users per month, that’s 

People who are older, a little more mature, who have professional jobs or an interesting life actually do really well on this platform.

What is TikTok Like?

When you open up TikTok, the app on your phone, what you're going to see is basically kind of a side by side feed.

The very first feed that pops up is a feed called For You.

 And those are videos that at least when you first jump on the platform are not yet tailored to you. They're mostly chronological, they’re chosen videos, they're viral videos. 

You're going to be kind of surprised by some of the content you see in your feed. 

Then when you swipe your thumb to the right, you'll be able to see a second newsfeed, which is these videos that take up your entire screen called “FOLLOWING”. 

And those are from the people that you follow. 

Until you follow people, you won't have videos there, but once you start following people, all of their videos are conveniently put into your second newsfeed. 

Every video is about the size of your cell phone screen, which is awesome. And you're going to see usually about 15 seconds of some type of burst of attention grabbing videos.

Similar to Music.ly, TikTok first started as kind of a lipsync app. 

People were lipsyncing to popular songs from their favorite artists. 

More recently, people have really moved into creating almost like an interpretive video to every single sound-byte. It's really interesting, but basically you want to think of how creative you can get with videos.

It doesn't take long to start kind of identifying the culture that can be present on TikTok. 

What Should my Profile/Bio Look Like?

Your actual profile is able to have one profile photo. So you want it to be a great one that really shows who you are.

From there, you also have about 140 characters to explain in your bio who you are, why people should follow you, why they should get to know you. 140 characters is really short. You have to be super concise. 

What I like to do is just kind of have a couple of keywords in my profile and then I also have my link in my profile in the bio, but it's not clickable. 

I just know that it's further exposure of my brand. I also put some fun emojis in it, so it's plain text plus emojis. 

You will also be able to see on your profile a feed of all of your videos. Your drafts are saved there. It's pretty easy to access. You can watch your old videos. My kids love watching my old videos cause we've got a lot of funny and sassy ones.

And in case you're wondering if you download TikTok, you can follow me @themrspedersen :]

Special Features of TikTok

TikToks’ hashtags are not weighted. There's not an algorithm, so it's beautiful because it's almost like an open playing field for how to rank for videos.

It's not based on who's spending on advertising yet. 

It's super searchable. In terms of organic hashtags, I'm absolutely in love with how discoverable all of my videos can be depending on how I use them. 

However, that wide open playing field starts to shift slightly as TikTok learns:

• What you're engaging with
• What you're searching for 
• What types of videos you produce 
• Who is bound to engage with you 
• Who you're likely actually consume the videos from

I've noticed my for you feed has definitely changed slightly, especially as I started to upload some videos with the Minnesota hashtag. I started discovering that there were more videos in my four year feed relating to Minnesota, which is really cool. 

How do I Create Content/Videos on TikTok?

When you open the platform you have the ability to record in-app similar to an Instagram story. 

One thing that makes TikTok really different from an Instagram story is that you can hold down the button to record and when you let your thumb up it doesn't end the video, but rather you can almost put together different portions of a video.

Hold your thumb down, record for a couple seconds, change everything up and hit the button again, record for a couple more seconds, which is neat because you can put together these really cool edits. 

Now the actual ability to edit your videos in the platform isn't great, but it's okay because you can also upload pre-existing videos that you've already edited or that you've taken on your phone.

One thing that I do find incredible is the overall ability to use the effects within TikTok. 

The effect capabilities are incredible. They're easy to use, they're super fun. Some of them feel a little more high tech than, for example, Instagram. 

There's also the ability to add text on the actual video, kind of like an Instagram story. However, the text is not clickable. It's got its own closed ecosystem. So there's no link within anywhere on TikTok that allows you to leave the platform.

You're able to create videos to other people's audio, which is really fun. There's an entire catalog of sounds, of music, of things that you can use to create videos to - that last for 15 seconds, sometimes even 60 seconds. 

But I will say that my favorite videos are the ones where I actually create my own video or create my own audio and natively capture it in the application. 

Now there's one other thing too that is really interesting and that is you do have the ability to put text as a part of the description of your video that stays there the whole time. 

Some people use this area to write a click baity little title and I think that is also 140 characters. I wasn't able to find the exact character limit, but I just know it's never enough. That's all I know. It's never enough. 

You can use a combination of a title that explains the video as well as hashtags and just like Instagram, you want to use the combination of hashtags that are short form and niche down and some that are a little bit bigger so that you hopefully grow.

Why Would I Want to Create My Own Native Audio? 

Native audio - meaning a video with an audio that I created/recorded and uploaded. The reason being, if it's a really great audio, if it's funny, if it's different. One of the things that people can do as they discover you is they can actually take your audio and create a video to your audio, but it always attributes to your profile - increasing your exposure.

Every single time someone clicks the audio from their video, it's going to bring them back to you. You are the creator. It's a great way to start kind of branching out and having more people find you, making yourself more discoverable. 

Can you Advertise on TikTok?

Yes. That’s a whole ‘nother topic for another day.

What do Notifications Look Like When People Follow/Like/Comment?

There's one feature that most people don't realize on TikTok until they kind of play around on it for awhile. Each person has a tab for notifications. As people start to engage with your videos or follow you, you will see a whole list of notifications popping up.

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Can You go Live on TikTok?

At the very top of your notifications, you’ll see people going live. Livestream capabilities become available when you hit 1000 followers on TikTok.

This  sounds simple because most of us are familiar with Facebook or Instagram or YouTube where hitting a thousand is not too difficult. 

TikTok, takes some time to get traction. 

How Many Followers is Considered “Good”?

I have 5,851 followers on TikTok. People on the platform are like, ‘oh my gosh’, you're so famous. 

And it's funny because on any other platform, it doesn't feel famous, but 5,800 followers is a substantial following on TikTok. Some of the top users have even hundreds of thousands.

I know last time I checked, Gary Vaynerchuk has like 260k followers. Celebrities usually have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. 

Some of the top creators have between 1-20million followers. 

It's not the norm to have 100 million followers. 

How Do You Monetize on TikTok?

One of the things that's really powerful about going live - the larger that your audience gets - the more visibility you get on your lives. 

So when you go live, all of your followers see that you go live and they're able to share it with their audiences, which is kind of nice too. 

You can incentivize them for sharing it with their audiences. When you start to grow, once you become verified, it shows up in many people's audiences. It shows up in their notifications. 

When you go live, people have the ability to purchase coins and then give you gifts for an exchange of those coins.

Those gifts are called Concerts, I’m Very Rich, Drama Queen, Italian Hands, etc. There are these little icons that pop up on the screen and it highlights you and it's kind of cool. 

They range in price from 50 cents to $50, which is kind of crazy. When you have a thousand followers, you can live stream on to TikTok and you can actually make money if that's how you prioritize everything.

How Can I Use Other People’s Lives to Grow?

It's a good way to actually build up your following if you want to go that route. 

When you go on to popular creators lives, you can test out gifting them one of these gifts, which range in price from 50 cents to $50. There are also some incredible growth strategies there. 

Comprehensive Review of Other Features...

Technically using the platform is pretty simple. I would say that actually figuring out what to create, how to create great content, how to get eyeballs on that content - those are some of the bigger challenges that arise with TikTok. 

It doesn't feel like there's been a ton of developments. 

Text on the screen has been a newer development. I really like it. 

When you go live at disappears - kind of like the old days of Instagram lives, they would just disappear.

It doesn't catalog them at all. 

There are some different things I wish TikTok would roll out, but I'm going to have to spend some time kind of further articulating what those are. Put together my dream list and if you're someone who is a part of the TikTok team, oh my gosh, reach out to me: [email protected] 

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