Background:
Initially the thinking was that this is a platform, a space for teens as a means to procrastinate but with the pandemic it has evolved into everyone’s favourite app to create, watch and participate in mostly meaningless entertainment. In a Namibian context, in 2020 “Tik Tok" was the 7th and 8th most searched term on Namibia YouTube. Even though the age demographics for the platform have expanded, it is still the best place to build a relationship with GenZ audiences.
What you need to know:
1st and foremost you need to acknowledgement that the platform is very different from other social networking apps with their algorithm being the most notable differential. Algorithm is a set of instructions or rules that create the recipe for how the technology works.
The algorithm in this case is geared towards serving content to the user based on defined indicators of interest, the goal is always to keep you on the platform, so relevancy of content is paramount. Where your Zuckerberg apps focused on serving you friends content, on Tik Tok its all geared towards interests and your user profile, content discovery is the fuel.
Let’s highlight the indicators of interest.
o Video engagement, how much engagement the video has already accumulated or is likely to accumulate based on the time it has been live.
o Content relevancy, does the subject matter of the content form part of the users interests.
o Language and geography, does the content piece share location and language with the user, this is where the algorithm is geared to serve localized content.
o Audio and duets, trending sounds and songs are more likely to be served to a broader audience.
o Hashtags and keywords, in order to categorise the content the algorithm picks up on the hashtags used and keywords within the caption to ensure content relevancy.
o User engagement, completed views, watch time and previous engagement on similar content will determine whether a content piece is high interest enough to serve to the user.
So how do we win?
o Niche targeting, find your audience and niche it up. Find the audience(s) where the most value and relevancy lies with, create content around those themes and interests that your brand can leverage off. This in turn will establish that in that specific interest, your brand is an aficionado, aiding in content discoverability and awareness.
o Follow accounts that are influential to those Niche audiences for inspiration and trendspotting, with all interests there are already known thought leaders. Follow them! Learn from them! And spot trends in their content that you can borrow/stitch/duet so that you can get a foothold in that niche.
o Use influencers of the niche audiences, you’ve seen the power that these influential accounts have with audiences that your are aiming to target. Now collaborate with them to demonstrate to your shared audiences that you are part of the community and are brave enough to show appreciation for your followers and advocates. It also doesn’t need to always be the 1m follower accounts, aim to collab with rising stars and aim to have more authentic partnerships.
o Do challenges and host contests, remember we’re building cultural relevance here with this audience. Part of the journey to establish that relevance is to engage this audience or community by setting them a challenge that relates to both their interests and your brand. Incentives are nice but not always a must, sometimes just acknowledging your community goes a long way.
o Use sounds, remember that not only has the app changed how we consume visual entertainment, but it has also had profound cultural impacts on music. Artists and musicians have in parallel adapted to these changes, using the app and platform to gain traction on a song with nothing more than a hook or snippet, use this as an opportunity to plug into the trend and deliver meaningful entertaining content using the trending sounds. Tapping into the trending songs bodes well for discoverability and relevance.
o Experiment with features and content, don’t be scared to play around with the visual effects and emerging features. Create Tik Tok content for Tik Tok!
o Leverage all 3 content types, trending, long form and short 15second snips. Consistency is key and with that comes regular content. In order to not make your account stale or boring utilise all 3 content types, trending content is aimed at being part of the conversation and becoming discoverable through viral videos, longer videos up to 3 minutes are utilised to better tell your brand story and short videos with sharp hooks to quickly deliver on the fly content.
o Use voice overs and solid captions to make your content accessible to all! For brands who don’t have a person or persona tied to their account, voiceover features add a voice to the video and it doesn’t need to be yours. In a desktop experiment we ran we found that the AI voice on platform gained more views than our original recorded audio for the same video.
Ads:
Sadly, advertising on the platform is not available to us yet, but here’s a quick breakdown of some ad types we can look forward to.
- In feed ads, these are the ads that run within a user feed with are served natively.
- Video ads, similar to in feed ads are capped at 60seconds and run on both the Tik Tok feed as well as their expanded network of apps.
- Spark ads are similar to other social network ad types as they allow the promotion of organic content, running through the Tik Tok feed.
Case Studies:
Gymshark is one of the brands that owns the space by publishing impossible feats and fitness memes, not scared to make fun of themselves and the fitness community. Their account may not always place the brand or products at the center of the content but they maintain relevance and awareness by understanding what entertains their followers.
Another brand that benefits off Tik Tok content is Amazon, making bank off trending videos such as “Things TikTok Made Me Buy” and “Things You Didn’t Know You Needed Off Of Amazon”.
Our favourite case study comes from Little Moons , even though the brand has been around since 2010, the product really gained cultural relevance through it’s Tik Tok presence. The brand taps into trending sounds and challenges like this one, making the product the hero, simple yet effective. The ASMR nature of their content also capitalizes on the virality of the content type through cutting, crushing or smashing these little ice cream balls. Spending a few minutes scrolling through their videos will surely make you want to try some, with sales at Tesco going up by 700%!
An independent communications expert, analyzed the top 100 videos in 2019 on the platform and discovered that 80% of top videos were 20 seconds or less. Moreover, most viral recipes are five ingredients or less.
Recipe videos that work on the platform are “simple and visual,”
Nutter Butter has 315,000 followers and 1.6 million likes on the platform, outpacing its communities on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. From a cookie-led “house tour” of a grocery store to a continued feud between the peanut butter snack and its mortal enemy jelly, Nutter Butter embraces iPhone-filmed videos and quirky content.
Most importantly, keep it casual fun and entertaining, the value of the platform lies in entertainment. The evergreen nature of the platform content means that a video with very little views on one day can gain mass virality overnight. Given how much TikTok encourages creativity, it’s up to the brands to be creative themselves and give consumers a good reason to engage with them.
HAVE FUN!