TikTok has come a long way from being a company that was facing a domestic ban to holding steady and continuing to build its reputation as the hottest new social platform on the planet. Given its recent clearance to continue circulating content on US soil, businesses are flocking to the platform to try and stake their audience claim before things get too saturated.
If you have those same goals, you’re reading the right post.
Getting followers on TikTok isn’t unlike getting followers on any social platform. Your success will come down to knowing your audience, consistency, and a handful of other fringe factors.
To learn more about how best to explore your TikTok audience, we implore you to keep reading to take in our growth strategies.
1. Define Your Audience
Building anything in the B2C space starts with defining your audience.
How old are the people that consume your content? What do they like to do? What are some of the things they hate?
Sit down with your team and aggregate as much information as possible about the people you sell to. Try to gather enough information that you can make a “customer persona” which is a mock person that embodies all of the core qualities of your audience.
From here on out, everything you do from a content creation standpoint should be done with your persona in mind.
2. Ask Your Audience What Their Favorite Content Is
Even when you get a beat on who your audience is, there’s still a fair amount of guesswork that may go into determining what content they enjoy. Since guesswork costs money, we always advocate that TikTok content creators go straight to the source and ask their audiences what type of content they’d like to see.
If you have no followers on TikTok, surveying your audience is going to be a challenge. If you already have a following on Instagram, Twitter, or elsewhere though, you may be able to poll those people and import your findings to your TikTok account.
3. See What’s Popping Competitively
Doing competitive research is one of the most cost-effective means of audience analysis. It allows you to quickly see which kinds of posts work and which kinds don’t without having to spend any money or time on creating content yourself.
Create a list of at least 5 of your top competitors. See if any of them have effective TikTok presences. If any one of them do, deep dive into their content and notice patterns around the kinds of content they’re producing and the results they’re seeing.
Any findings you can pull from that assessment will be valuable to your ability to focus your content, better impress your audience, and grow your follower base.
4. Use Hashtags in Your Captions
A great way to increase engagement on TikTok and simultaneously raise your follower count is to start leaning on hashtags. TikTok allows you to Hashtag your posts in their caption section which then helps the platform better sort your content and share it with relevant people.
Hash-tagging is particularly helpful when you’re trying to get your content organized alongside other content that is trend-chasing on the platform, which is an important TikTok concept.
5. Appreciate Trends
Speaking of trends, TikTok is a platform that leans heavily on challenges, themes, and similar content that communities of users try to create posts around. As a business owner, when it’s appropriate to do so, you should also be producing TikTok videos that trend chase so you can come off as an engaged TikTok user and so your content stands a chance of attracting all of the eyeballs that trending content themes tend to attract.
You can find what’s trending on TikTok by exploring the platform’s Discover section.
6. Post When People Are Watching
Not all post times are created equal on TikTok or any other social media platform. This is where diving into your audience analytics gets important.
In your analytics section, you’ll be able to see when it is that your TikTok for business efforts see the most traction. Perhaps on Wednesdays, your posts get 70% of the traffic you see for the entire week. If you’re posting a video per day and are seeing that Wednesday metric, it might inspire you to post additional content on Wednesdays or to at least save your best content for that day.
7. Look for Collaboration Opportunities
Riding the coattails of influencers on TikTok is something that businesses are well versed in. If you can find a way for your company to collaborate with somebody that’s well-liked on the platform, you can expect an almost immediate return in the way of follower boosts, audience conversions, and more.
The trouble here is that to get an influencer’s attention, you’re either going to need money to pay them or a lot of followers. If you don’t have a lot of followers, it might be cheaper to buy TikTok followers so you can posture rather than paying influencers outright for their partnership.
Be wary if you go that route though as buying followers in certain contexts may violate TikTok’s terms of use.
Getting More Followers on TikTok Is a Content-Driven Process
You can employ all sorts of creative strategies when trying to gain followers on TikTok. At the end of the day though, if your content is not enticing to your target audience, you’re going to have a hard time picking up traction.
We hope we’ve given you valuable tools to help you refine your content ideas and strategically release that content so you can maximize your viewership. If you find that you need more guidance on TikTok or other social media platforms, we welcome you to explore additional advice on our blog.
