So you keep hearing about this thing the kids are using called the TikTok.

Let’s talk about what it is and how you can be using it for your business.

So what exactly is TikTok? Well, TikTok is a 15-second video social media platform focused on doing lots of silly things like pranks, music, challenges all kinds of fun, silly stuff. Fifteen seconds at a time. This is a craze that is sweeping the nation for most people under the age of 30.

There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself to see if TikTok is worth your time before you dive into it for your business. First, is, does your business talk to millennials and Gen Zers and younger? If you have a product that is for them, it is for younger people, for people who are coming up in that age range, you 100% need to be there because that is where they are spending the vast majority of their time.

The second thing to ask, are you a worldwide brand? Do you talk to people all over the place? Maybe even partially, nationwide. If you are in the United States, you talk to everybody in the United States. You talk to everybody in Canada. You’re talking to everybody in Asia. Then you need to be on TikTok because it is a global brand, and you want to be making sure that you have a presence there as well because it is vital for your brand to be in all the places if that’s where you’re doing business.

Another thing to ask is, are you looking for something new? Are you just rather bored with doing all of the Instagramming and the Facebooking and tweeting? And you’re like, “I just wanna have some fun, let loose.” Definitely, you want to check out TikTok. One of the things you should know about TikTok is you don’t want to take yourself very seriously when it comes to TikTok. You are literally having fun, pranking, and learning dance steps to videos and just being silly. Like letting your hair down metaphorically and maybe actually literally. You’ve got to have fun if you’re going to make TikTok work for you.

You can also do a lot of fun things like cross-promote what you’re doing on TikTok and share it on Instagram and Facebook. We are all about being efficient in this content marketing game where you create something once and use it in lots of places.

What’s really cool about TikTok is that you can automatically share like on your Instagram stories your TikTok-ness. So have fun, cross-promote, and just be silly. It’s also straightforward to get views and so it is a growing platform. And if you can do it right and be silly just enough and use the right hashtags and give ’em the right challenge, you can get a lot of views onto your brand.

So what are some things that you need to do if you’re going to be using TikTok for videos? First things first, use hashtags. You definitely want to make sure that just like with Instagram and Twitter, you are using hashtags to be found. Again, TikTok needs to know where to put you. For people to find you, you have to be using them. Make sure you research what hashtags you want to use based on the challenge you’re doing and your industry niche. The easiest thing that you can do when you’re doing stuff on TikTok is to add text to the video. Adding text is an entertaining way to have a conversation with your viewer while you’re being silly to beat in the background, and it really does convert well.

Another thing that is great with TikTok is that you can do multi-shots. So you can stage something like this: do one shot, stop, move to the next, do the next shot, move to the next, take the shot and move to the next. It’s weird to get used to with the timing, and you probably will end up spending more time shooting and editing what you have going on in the video than the actual creation of the video, but it’s going to be worth it.

And if you definitely want TikTok to work for you, you have to try trends and hashtags and things that are going on. The easiest way to find trends is to go to the discover section of TikTok and see what’s popular right now and see, okay, what are these challenges and how can I tie them into my business in some way?

If you’re looking to grow your business, better social media and content marketing take action now. Contact us today. 858-228-7697