How To Grow A Brand Account On TikTok

Since its launch, TikTok was seen as a revolutionary platform to connect with people all around the world. With some remarkable innovations and additions done by the developers in the last few years, today it has become a must for businesses to have a strong presence on TikTok.

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But why has TikTok become such an influential social media app?

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Probably because, TikTok is the 5th most used social app in the world today, with over 1 Billion active users every month. Not only that,

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41.7% of those users are between the ages of 18-24

31% are between 25-34.

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Which makes it one of the best platforms to engage with young audiences and promote your business.

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One more reason why people have begun to use TikTok for business is the different style of how its algorithm works. Organic reach is slowly dying on every platform but here’s where TikTok really shines.

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Unlike Facebook or Youtube, you don’t have to be popular (when starting) to get people to see your content. Even someone with less than 100 followers can create a viral video and grow their account within a couple of days.

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However, it's not as simple as it looks! As the algorithm gets smarter with each passing day, growing on TikTok, especially on a new account can be quite confusing. What works for your competitors may or may not work for you.

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So, how do you figure out exactly what you should do? Well, that’s why we are here!

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To give you a practical method to grow your brand account on TikTok. Through this post, we’re going to explain to you the fundamentals of TikTok while also talking about the common mistakes you might be making.

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Here are 6 crucial steps to efficiently use TikTok for business:

Step 1: Getting a business account

If you are new to TikTok or have recently created an account, We advise checking which type of an account you have.    

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What I mean is that TikTok allows the creation of Personal, Business, and Creator accounts. Each of these categories is designed and optimized to promote a specific kind of content and has its features, benefits, and reach.

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For instance, using TikTok for business enables you to link your Shopify store directly to the account, which your customers can use to buy products you’ve mentioned in your video/profile without any hassle.

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When you create an account on TikTok, by default it puts your account in the personal category, so as a business organization, you must switch it to a business account to unlock all additional features.

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Here’s how you do that,

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Open your TikTok account and log in to your account (or create one if you haven’t).

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Click on “Me” and you’ll see an option to “edit your profile”.

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The final step is to click on the three dots in the upper right corner, which will open the “Manage account” window.

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Herein, you’ll get the option to switch to a pro account under the Account control section.

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Step 2: Optimizing Your Profile

Although switching your profile into a business account helps if you want the TikTok algorithm to favor you, even more, you must optimize your profile.

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In the previous section, I’ve already mentioned how you get to the “edit your profile” tab, but what do I actually mean by optimizing a profile?

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As you would know, TikTok has millions of creators, so to separate yourself from the crowd you’d need to niche down your profile and your content.  

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There are 3 primary factors you need to optimize for better visibility of your business:

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- Have a short, memorable username (preferably your brand name).

- Set a clear profile picture. (Your Logo)

- The perfect size for a profile picture is 200 pixels x 200 pixels.

- Have a bio that tells users exactly what you do?

- Include relevant keywords in your bio.

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For example, if you are a health and wellness brand, a good bio for your brand would be “Health and wellness coach” or “Helping people adopt a healthy lifestyle”.

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Other than that, include emojis and a strong Call-to-action (like your Website, or other social platform links) in your bio.

Step 3: Identifying your audience

Before setting anything else into motion, the most important aspect you should figure out is your brand’s target audience?

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Different social media platforms harbor different types of audiences, for instance, if your brand deals in products pertaining to a senior and mature section of people, TikTok may not be a great place to promote it.

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On the other hand, if your business deals with the young and middle-aged demographic (Age: 15-35), then TikTok can provide amazing recognition.

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Having a defined audience will help you figure out,

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Whom you are targeting?

Their age and location demographics

Behavioral Tendencies

What are their likes and dislikes?

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This, in turn, will help you create what is popularly known as a “buyer persona”.

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A buyer persona is an outline of your customers made using real-time data.

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By using this, not only will you save a ton of time and effort structuring your content, but you’ll also be able to persuade people much better.

Step 4: Creating Viral Content

Creating viral content seems to be the most obvious step on this list but at the same time, it is much more than just following a trending song/dance or video concept.

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No doubt tending sounds are important, but several other factors go into making your post go viral.

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Here are some of those factors that you should pay attention to

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Video And Sound Quality: Since that’s what TikTok is all about, you can’t compromise when it comes to having good video and sound quality in your videos. You don’t need to do something exceptional, but

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Make sure that you record in a well-lit room with good background and if needed, invest in a professional mic instead of using your phone/laptop.

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Don’t shy away from showing your face, since it can encourage people to trust your brand. But if for some reason you can’t do that, try to make visually appealing content that attracts your audience as well as keeps them hooked until the end.

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Content Formats: Another important factor to focus on is the type of content you are going to post.

‍What we mean is that TikTok is mainly designed and used for short video content. These could be related to comedy, motivational, informative, art, etc.

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To grow your business account, be sure to post that fits the format of a short video. Keep it fun, interactive, and most importantly less information-heavy, since that doesn’t resonate with most users’ intentions when they use TikTok.

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Also, nobody likes bland and plain content so don’t forget to add some transitions, Dialogue Reenactments, trending challenges, and QnA from time to time.

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Timing: The times you post on TikTok, Instagram, or any other social platform play an important role in providing visibility. You should always aim to post content when your audience is most active.

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You can get those timings by analyzing the “insight” feature TikTok offers.

Using these analytics you can easily figure out where the audience is from and at what times are they most active. However, to do this you first need to have some posts on your profile.

If you don’t, try and experiment with these times. These were collected after researching the activity of over 1,00,000 TikTok posts.

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‍Best Times to Post on TikTok

Monday

6 AM, 10 AM, 10 PM

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Tuesday

2 AM, 4 AM, 9 AM

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Wednesday

7 AM, 8 AM, 11 PM

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Thursday

9 AM, 12 AM, 7 PM

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Friday

5 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM

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Saturday

11 AM, 7 PM, 8 PM

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Sunday

7 AM, 8 AM, 4 PM

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Hashtags: Using relevant and trending hashtags is the no.1 way to grow a TikTok business account.Hashtags help your content in two ways,

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Firstly, hashtags help the TikTok algorithm categorize your content and show it to the relevant audience. For instance, if you upload a book recommendation and you use related hashtags, now the TikTok algorithm will show it to people who are most likely to like, comment or share it.

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Secondly, hashtags are by far the best way to show your profile to non-followers. Try mixing your niched hashtags with general and more popular hashtags to reach most people while also staying true to your business.

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Or, you could also study what your competitors are using and experiment with those.

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Frequency: Though there is no set number as to how many times you should post, TikTok recommends posting 1-4 times/ a day to reach out to maximum people. You’ll still need to evaluate if that's working for you using TikTok analytics.

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Step 5: Build An Online Network

Whether it’s an offline or an online business, networking remains an important aspect of growing your business.

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Besides posting valuable content on TikTok, connecting with other users, brands and influencers is also a great way to grow your brand account on TikTok.

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Here are some great ways you could become a part of the TikTok community:

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Engage with your audience: To gain followers is one thing but to gain loyal connections, you have to make them feel like they matter. And the best way to do that is to interact with people who interact with your posts.

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If you have a small account, interact with every comment or follow you get but if you have a slightly bigger presence, then interact for at least 1 hour after you post.

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Collab with other creators: The next thing you could do to gain more exposure is to collaborate with other creators/influencers in your niche. You could make a video together or you can duet their existing videos and add your knowledge to that.

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You could start commenting and sharing their posts to get recognized and slowly move your way to work with them.

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Use Other Social Platforms: This is a mistake that most businesses make on TikTok, where they don’t use other social apps to get more traffic.

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Mentioning your TikTok account link in your Instagram bio or youtube channel can be a great way to bring that established to follow you even on TikTok

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You should also repurpose your TikTok content to other platforms like Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and Facebook.

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Lastly, you could use user-generated content (posts people have made related to you) and put them on your TikTok feed.

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Step 6: TikTok Ads    

An additional way to grow your brand account on TikTok is by ruining ads. Advertisements are under the “paid” methods to grow, so you might want to avoid using them at the beginning.

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That being said, you could always blend the organic and paid techniques to grow even faster. This feature is great for businesses (like yours) to collect data on what works and what doesn’t.

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There are several types of ads you can choose to run but the best ones are the in-feed ads, branded hashtag challenges, and branded filters since they are fun to participate in and don’t come off as too-salesy.

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Conclusion

There you have it! The 6 important steps you should focus on to grow TikTok business account.

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All these steps when performed in the coalition will definitely help you grow your brand account. As a beginner, you can use these steps to get data that will in turn help you design your content creation framework.

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As someone who already has a decent following, these tips will still be helping  you to analyze,

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What you are doing right? (Keep doing that)

What mistakes are you making? (Work on eliminating these)

How to grow your business even further? (there are always more people that can be turned into customers)

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If I had to give a bonus tip that’ll make all your efforts even more efficient then that would be having fun. We get it, you have a brand to run and products to sell, but most people don’t use TikTok to get spammed promotional stuff by brands.

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The best thing you can do is to make your content fun and entertaining for people, that way it’ll connect with your potential customers without having you make any extra effort.

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