Have you noticed some changes to your Instagram and Facebook feeds? There certainly seem to be a lot more short videos showing up… just like the short videos that are integral to TikTok.

TikTok, once seen as a place where teens post funny shorts reminiscent of Vine (remember that?), is now the “It” child all the other social media platforms want to be like. Instagram and Facebook are pushing Stories and Reels, and even YouTube introduced Shorts.

If you’ve yet to start dedicating some of your social media marketing bandwidth to TikTok, you may be missing out. The platform now attracts a wide range of demographics and there’s a “Tok” for everyone - from BookTok to LGBT-Tok to MoneyTok. While the audience does skew younger (only 7% of users are over 50) and toward B2C over B2B, there are plenty of opportunities to connect with your audience there.

To help you connect with TikTok’s 138 million monthly active users in the US (and 1 billion globally), here are 5 best practices you must do to find success with your TikTok Marketing.

5 TikTok Best Practices for Brands

Jump on Trends

If there’s one thing you should know about TikTok, it’s that reach and engagement on the platform is crazy. Say goodbye to getting 300 likes on a post, even though you have 60,000 followers - TikTok hasn’t limited organic reach the same way Instagram has, in fact, it champions it. Hit the right trend at the right time, and you can go viral, even if you have very few followers.

Make sure you’re on TikTok in the relevant communities and pay attention to what’s trending so you can produce videos for your brand that take advantage of the trend. This can be doing a challenge, a duet (where you create a video with the video and/or audio from another creator), or simply using a trending song.

Find Educational or Entertaining Ways to Promote

TikTok is the ultimate example of how long our attention spans are, and no one’s going to wait around while you advertise to them if there’s nothing in it for them. Try to think of your promotion as less like ads and more like enticements - it’s a subtle difference, but it can move the tone of your content from “Do you want this?” to “You need this.”

If you’re not sure how to go about this, think about what your audience needs to know before they can buy from you, what questions they may have you can answer, and how you can show them how to use your product. If you need inspiration here, search for “TikTok made me buy it”, “cool things to buy on Amazon”, and “made me buy” on TikTok to see how other brands and influencers are marketing products in entertaining ways.

Don’t Do Fly-By Uploads

If you’ve been in the world of social media marketing for a while, you won’t be surprised to hear that consistent uploads are key to finding success marketing on TikTok in 2022. That said, it’s even more important to actually spend time on the app.

Spend time on TikTok and understand what’s working and why. While it’s difficult to predict trends, if you’re on TikTok regularly engaging with other creators and your followers, you’ve got a much better chance of seeing the beginning of a trend and jumping on it. Remember, many TikTok trends come and go in just a day or two - you need to be present, or you’ll be behind.

Lead the Pack

Is it a good idea to jump on trends when they arise? Yes, but the creator who made the challenge or trend in the first place is the one who wins. Remember, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to do something new - just twist ideas that are already out there to better align with your brand or to show your creativity. The aim is to offer something people haven’t seen before in the way you show it.

Be Authentic

Spend an hour on TikTok, and you’ll find people sharing their fears, challenges, wins, and having fun with the content they’re making. Being authentic on TikTok doesn’t mean you have to bear all your flaws for all to see, it just means you let go a little and show the fun, personable side of your brand.

The simplest way to think about if you’re being authentic is to look at your brand values, those 5 words (or so) that sum up what your brand stands for, and see if the content you’ve created aligns with it. Over time, you’ll develop your brand’s style on TikTok, and being authentic will become second nature.

If you can nail all 5 of these best practices, you’ll see your follower count rocket and, if you master tip #2, you’ll see your sales increase exponentially, too.

We know coming up with new marketing ideas isn’t easy and is often time-consuming, which is why we founded Hype AI. With our help, you can browse through the marketing ideas from some of the top experts in the world and use them to inspire your own marketing campaigns, whether that be on TikTok, Twitter, or elsewhere. Click here to start your search.

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