TikTok is one of the best platforms for growing a business. With over 15 million daily users, this app can bring you viral fame and help improve brand awareness. Unfortunately, these millions of TikTokers are not only your potential audience. They are your competitors, too.
Discovering how to grow your TikTok followers can be overwhelming, especially if you’re just starting. Thousands of strategies about how to get more views on TikTok exist. However, not many tell you the most important thing, which is increasing your audience effectively.
Lucky for you, we researched the best ways to grow on TikTok this year and compiled them into this helpful guide. Read on to find out how to grow your TikTok account overnight!
In this article
- 1. Define Your Target Audience and Deliver Viral Content with Catchy Intro
- 2. Focus on Branding Consistency
- 3. Stay on Track with Trends, But Don’t Be Afraid To Be Unique and Create Your Own
- 4. Run Contests and Giveaways
- 5. Post High-Quality Videos
- 6. Post Frequently and Find The Peak Hours for Your Audience
- 7. Use Other Social Media Platforms to Promote Your Content
1. Define Your Target Audience and Deliver Viral Content with Catchy Intro
Contrary to popular misconception, TikTok is not an app only for kids. It’s true, over 47% of its audience is between 10 and 29 years old, in the US alone. However, the other demographics are on the rise. For instance, between June 2020 and May 2021, the 40-49 years-old demographic increased by 7%. So, you have an expanding market to use for both commercial and influencer purposes.
Take the time to research your audience and see what type of content it favors the most. If you already have a profile on other social platforms, check the demographic majority in those audiences. This way, you can understand better how to tweak your content to grow your TikTok followers.
For example, your audience for cooking tutorials may consist of hospitality professionals on LinkedIn, readers on Facebook, and beginner cooks on TikTok. Once you pin down your audience, research the competition, and observe their most successful content. Lastly, brainstorm some ideas to create original tiktoks for your profile.
Make a Good First Impression
At first, TikTok allowed its users to create only 15-second videos. As of July 2021, you can make videos up to 3 minutes long. This new feature is a good omen for long-pitch marketers. However, some estimate that the ideal TikTok video length will remain on average around 15-20 seconds.
With this in mind, you should create catchy content that grips the viewers’ attention from the get-go. With TikTok, you don’t have time for intros with fancy logos. You have to impress and make users crave more of your content. And, if you’re videos have high-quality, you can grow on TikTok faster than you’d expect.
2. Focus on Branding Consistency
One of the unwritten rules of social media is that consistent and on-trend content builds a long-term audience. TikTok is one of the newest members of the social media family, but it works mostly by the same principles as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
As of 2021, TikTok has reached the milestone of 1 million views per day. With a plethora of videos uploaded to the platform every day, it is difficult to get many views for your content. However, it is not impossible.
You have to reach a high level of brand consistency to understand how to grow your TikTok following. Most TikTok beginners have a difficult time achieving it. That’s because the content variety on the platform is overwhelming. Like many of them, you will want to do a bit of everything, including lip-syncing, dancing to music, and comedy skits.
Since you have already studied your audience, you should already know the type of content they prefer. If you like creating it, then start producing it, too. And, once you experience success with one kind of content, you stick to it. Too much variety or switching back and forth between content types could decimate your audience.
Lastly, another factor to building a consistent brand on TikTok is your posting behavior. You will have to upload your videos at the same time every day. Otherwise, you may lose crucial views from loyal followers who don’t get their content fix regularly.
Posting videos every day doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to create content daily. You can shoot several videos on the same day, and spread them evenly throughout the week. This way, you will have more time to read your profile analytics and look for new ways of how to get more views on TikTok.
3. Stay on Track with Trends, But Don’t Be Afraid To Be Unique and Create Your Own
Being popular on TikTok is all about being trendy. Simply put, when a new flavor of the week comes out, you have to incorporate it into your videos somehow. Here are three ways to do it:
Hashtags
The hashtag is a generally helpful tool on TikTok and all social media channels. It enables you to discover new audience segments and allows other users to find out about your profile for the first time. Above all, it keeps you on the popularity train running through the “For You” feed.
One of the easiest ways of using hashtags is including the most popular hashtags that are also relevant for your content. Copy it into your video’s description before publishing, sit back, and watch the views come in. Hopefully, with them, you get to grow your TikTok audience as well.
Here are some helpful guidelines on how to use hashtags on TikTok:
- Look for popular hashtags using the “Discover” button.
- Check the number of views for each hashtag.
- Add between 2 and 4 hashtags to each video.
- Renew your hashtags according to their popularity and relevancy.
- Use one or two popular hashtags and one less popular but relevant to your content, too.
Sounds
Today’s TikTok is a merger between two other apps, Douyin (TikTok’s name in China) and Musical.ly. The latter used to be a social media app for lip-sync videos. We can now see why the lip-syncing content is so popular on TikTok. Also, we can understand why sound is a fundamental success factor for TikTok videos.
Look for the most popular sounds on TikTok. They may vary from short jingles to brief sound effects. Then, incorporate them into your videos. More importantly, they don’t have to make sense. They only need to be in line with the latest sound trends on TikTok.
Challenges
TikTok challenges are fun and highly engaging. Also, they provide an easy route if you want to know how to grow your TikTok account fast.
Find the most popular challenges on TikTok and hop on their wagon while the trend lasts. Create a challenge video of your own. And, don’t worry. Most of them should be doable.
The TikTok algorithm works by showing you similar content to the videos you have watched so far. Therefore, it is unlikely you will stumble upon irrelevant challenges for your brand consistency.
Lastly, you should try to balance trend-imitations with unique creations in your content. In other words, it’s okay to replicate some of the popular sounds, hashtags, and challenges in your videos. However, you should also be bold enough to upload your own ideas. After all, if you want more followers, you should aim to be more of a trend-setter and less of a trend follower.
4. Run Contests and Giveaways
If you are wondering how to get more TikTok followers, you cannot look any further than contests and giveaways. A TikTok giveaway enables you to give prizes to users for free as long as they contribute to your posts with likes, comments, or tags. In return, you can build brand awareness on TikTok and increase your audience almost effortlessly.
For instance, you can ask users to tag their friends when commenting on less than one of your latest videos. In exchange for their input, they will enter a draw for a generic prize. The winner may get anything from a signed book, a customized t-shirt, or a discount for a particular service.
Contests and giveaways on TikTok are win-win tools. Firstly, you may attract new followers from the users’ tags. On the other hand, you build follower loyalty for those taking part in these challenges, and especially for the winner.
If you don’t know how to organize a TikTok giveaway, just take a look at Woorise, a top-notch giveaway tool that will help you set up and track your TikTok giveaways. It is easy to use and provides you with multiple social actions to increase user engagement easily.
Running your own TikTok contest or giveaway with Woorise helps you build a stronger bond with your audience. In the long-term, you should attract followers faster and engage easier with them.
5. Post High-Quality Videos
Video quality standards are high on TikTok. A brilliant idea for a TikTok video will not attract too many followers if you record it with the wrong filing equipment. The result will most likely be a poor-quality video that users will quickly scroll over and never share.
So, before your start your TikTok career, you may want to check your recording gear. Here are a few tips on how to shoot high-quality TikTok videos:
Choose a Top Camera
Like most TikTok users, you probably use your smartphone to shoot TikTok clips. If so, you may want to opt for one of the latest smartphone models from your brand of choice. Look for a top-quality camera that will produce similar videos.
Don’t forget the lights off!
Lighting makes all the difference between a poor-quality video and a viral, share-worthy TikTok clip. If you want to take your videos to the next level, you should consider investing in lighting bulbs, LED strip lights, and selfie lights.
Use a background
TikTok backgrounds have a powerful effect on viewers. For once, it makes your videos more engaging. Also, if you use the same background of all clips, you may enhance your brand consistency in the long run. Choose any kind of background you want as long as it is relevant to your content. You can use a physical one or implement it later through post-production software.
Use video editing software
Popular TikTok videos rarely come out perfect on the first take. More than often, you have to apply small changes in post-production. That’s why investing in a video editing app like InShot can help you produce better quality videos.
These small investments will pay well in the long run. Uploading high-quality content regularly can help you grow your TikTok account faster and more effectively.
6. Post Frequently and Find The Peak Hours for Your Audience
When TikTok users choose to follow your account, they do so because they expect more content of the same quality and style. When you fail to deliver, they will un-follow you quickly and, most likely, never choose to follow you back.
After you find out how to grow your TikTok followers, you must try your best to keep them following your profile.
The best way to do so is by posting frequently. An exact frequency for uploading TikTok videos does not exist. It differs from one account to another, and what works for some may not work for you.
How to see your TikTok Analytics
Another way to treat your audience deservedly is by posting when your followers are most likely to be online, also known as peak hours. Again, the peak hours for posting TikTok videos differ between accounts and depend on many factors, such as demographics, time zones, and content type.
You can find out the peak hours for your profile by switching to a Pro Account. Then, you go to your Analytics section and discover all the relevant data about your relationship with your followers.
Once you find out the time when your audience shows up on TikTok, you can tweak your posting schedule to accommodate it. This tactic should help you grow your TikTok followers steadily.
7. Use Other Social Media Platforms to Promote Your Content
It might seem strange, but you can learn how to grow your TikTok followers by not using TikTok all the time. This works by posting your TikTok videos on other social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Let’s face it! Not everyone uses TikTok. In fact, according to Statista, TikTok is only seventh in the table of social media platforms with the most users. TikTok has only roughly 732 million users compared to Instagram 2.2 billion users and Facebook’s user base of nearly 3 billion people.
If you want to grow your TikTok audience, you will have to snatch new users from the other social media networks. This tactic is also known as cross-promotion, and it can be very effective in building a loyal following. After all, if users go through the effort of downloading and installing TikTok just to see more of your videos, they will not disappear that quickly.
There you have it, 7 powerful tips on how to grow your TikTok followers this year. As you discover how to use the app to your advantage, you will find new ways to build a solid audience and attract more customers.
