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“Hey, I did a TikTok Dance Challenge video yesterday, have you guys watched it? 💃”
“Babe, check out the latest video regarding Putri Ariani receiving Golden Buzzer from America Got Talent, that’s getting 37.2 million views and that’s truly inspiring! 🚀”
TikTok has been the center of most of our conversations in our daily lives, whether it’s face-to-face or over the internet. We know how powerful TikTok is in today’s era and we’re going to delve into 5 tips on how brands can go viral on TikTok to ultimately drive brand awareness and generate sales. Before that, let’s take a glance at some of the facts about TikTok and how TikTok is developing in Malaysia.
Now that we have an idea of TikTok’s usage in Malaysia, it does seem that TikTok presents a valuable opportunity for brands to increase their brand visibility. Given TikTok’s ability to reach a sizeable audience, brands should not overlook the potential to use it for promoting businesses.
Some of you might be thinking: will TikTok be a good fit for my business?
For this question, it is crucial to first understand your current brand positioning, the intentions to penetrate into TikTok, the target audience and what are the deliverables you’re focusing on. Secondly, as we scroll through TikTok FYP, it is also good to see what your target audience is interested in so that you can produce content that would appeal to them.
In fact, TikTok provides a wide range of products & solutions while here we’ll be focusing on some important features for brands, which are: TikTok Shop, TikTok for Business, and TikTok Creator Marketplace.
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If you don’t already know, TikTok’s algorithm relies heavily on user interaction as it works in a way where TikTok will show content to users based on various factors:
- Videos you’ve watched or liked
- Content you’ve created
- Accounts you’ve followed
- Videos added to your favorites, etc.
Hence, brands should go through in-depth research within their particular niche to determine the type of content that could be worth exploring. By doing so, the content that you created would be shown to your targeted audience, and hence when the content gains significant exposure on TikTok, it elevates the chances of going viral.
Now we will dive into the 5 tips that your brand can utilize to go viral on TikTok:
1. Partake in the latest trend
- Brands can participate in trends such as doing a new dancing challenge, using popular audio or voiceover for your content, or creating innovative AI effects and become part of the buzz.
- Nevertheless, you need to first identify current brand positioning to decide which trends align with your goals.
- For instance, a fashion brand might try to hop onto a dance challenge, as new dance challenges seem to emerge almost bi-weekly.
- Incorporating popular or trendy audio in videos is another effective way to go viral on TikTok. There’s even a name list category named “Viral” in TikTok which offers a selection of popular audio options, which is handy for brands that recently joined TikTok.
2. Use relevant and creative hashtags
- Hashtag (#) is a valuable feature on TikTok that allows users to discover a bunch of related content when a particular caption includes the hashtag.
- Hashtags aid in increasing the chances for visibility within a huge database and meanwhile, enable users to find groups of content that they’re interested in.
- Create unique hashtags during important company events (e.g. new collection launch event) so that TikTok posts that contained those hashtags could be aggregated to scale up engagement while building a community inherently.
- With a pile of hashtags available on TikTok, it is recommended to conduct research and create hashtags relevant to your industries wisely to distinguish yourself.
If you don’t know where to start? Here are some of the useful tools for creating TikTok hashtags:
- TikTok hashtag generator - tiktokhashtags.com
- https://influencermarketinghub.com/tiktok-hashtag-generator/
- https://rapidtags.io/tiktok
3. Create valuable content
At its core, the primary motive behind people’s presence on social media is to access information and stay connected with the outside world.
- Brands should always keep abreast of the current happenings to create compelling content that resonates with consumers.
- Unfolding a brand’s competitive advantage, showcasing products or services provided, sharing the latest industry insights, or crafting content with the current hottest topics are conducive to the specific niche.
- Being consistent is the key when it comes to content posting where it is suggested that posting 3 times per day on TikTok elevates the chances that content is shown to your target audience.
- However, knowing the best posting schedule for your business is essential, and that underscores the importance of having a TikTok business account to access the dashboard for TikTok Analytics to sort out your optimal posting time on TikTok to maximize engagements.
- Combining high-quality content with optimal posting time, your content would be shown to your target audience when they are the most active on the platform.
4. Create a hook at the beginning & generate different video formats
Creating a TikTok video is easy for everyone but how do you capture the attention of users who are quickly scrolling through their feeds?
- Regardless of bit-sized videos or long-form videos on TikTok, it is crucial to hook in your audiences in the first few seconds while succinctly explaining the key takeaways of that particular video and how it is beneficial to the audiences.
- Brands can pique users’ interest and curiosity by spreading the most important key takeaways of the video right at the beginning, which encourages users to watch the entire content.
- Adding text elements or subtitles over a video might be effective since you don't want to miss out on any opportunity to reach potential users.
- Creating different video formats (both professional and down-to-earth videos) such as trying out transition videos, vlogs (video blogs), text-only videos, haul videos, how-to-guide videos, etc to demonstrate your brand’s diversity and high adaptability to consumers with different preferences.
- For instance, brands in the fashion industry may instead create content such as “Style Our Latest Summer Collection in 7 Ways!” to showcase the versatility of your products.
As brands create content that fulfills their audience's interest, TikTok’s algorithm responds by prioritizing the content’s visibility.
5. Be authentic and collaborate with influencers
Have you realized that not all the viral content on TikTok is created by macro-influencers or even celebrities? You got it right! Even creators with a small follower count can experience viral success on TikTok and that’s why brands should take this seriously.
- Some viral videos are incredibly simple (e.g. someone recapping a recent trendy event or sharing a funny incident on their day) which the authenticity and genuineness resonate with people’s daily life and hence why they can quickly go viral.
- Brands should understand that consumers nowadays might not necessarily gravitate toward highly polished videos, instead, they may be keen on more down-to-earth or authentic content.
- Consider partnering with nano-influencers as they can have a mighty impact on their followers due to the strong engagement and trusted relationship within the community.
- Constantly source for TikTok nano-influencers that are aligned with your brand image and business nature to achieve optimal results.
- With nano-influencers promoting a brand’s products or services through content in TikTok, the high level of trust they have built with their followers increase the chances of those products or services being sought after, boosts the visibility of the content in users’ ‘For You’ feed, and contributes to its potential to go viral on TikTok.
With TikTok’s continued growth, it has a huge potential to become an integral part of people’s lives. You can’t deny that it is an effective social media platform that most brands should consider utilizing for their marketing purposes. Following the five tips given above, going viral on TikTok will no longer be an impossible mission!
However, as a last reminder - brands would need to clearly figure out the current brand positioning, understand how TikTok algorithm works, and go through a trial-and-error process that could eventually lead your brand to viral success on TikTok.