TikTok has grown dramatically since it merged with Musical.ly. It is now effectively two apps: TikTok in the Western World, and Douyin in China. While it began as a lip-synching app, people upload a wide range of videos types nowadays.
Earlier this year we examined some of TikTok’s eye-opening statistics. Astoundingly, TikTok was the most downloaded non-game app in the Apple app store globally in the first quarter of 2018, and it still performs well. Today, it boasts over 1.6 billion users worldwide.
Of course, like all social apps, most people on TikTok aim to increase the number of interested followers they have. We all crave an audience deep down! I'm sure we'd all love to emulate Loren Gray and her 53.7 million TikTok followers.
There are many ways you can increase your following – legitimately without having to resort to buying fake followers. Here is our 8-step guide to getting more TikTok likes and followers.
Free TikTok Influencer Search Tool
We can now offer you a simple way to find TikTok influencers in a niche. All you need do is enter your topic of interest, and possibly a location if that matters to you, and our tool will come up with a list of ten relevant TikTok influencers.
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- Free TikTok Influencer Search Tool
- Step 1: Create the Perfect Profile
- Step 2: Know Who You Wish to Target
- Step 3: Create Interesting Videos That Stand Out from the Crowd
- Step 4: Establish Your Style
- Step 5: Come Across as Authentic
- Step 6: Take on Challenges
- Step 7: Use Your Other Social Accounts to Promote Your TikTok Videos
- Step 8: Collaborate with Others in Your Niche
- Above All Else – Don’t Buy Fake Followers
Step 1: Create the Perfect Profile
@brentrivera
Your profile is essential to your TikTok success. It will often be the place where you make your first impression to your fellow TikTokers. If people aren't impressed by a glance at your profile, they won't be interested in following you.
Ideally, you should upload a great profile picture of yourself (or your brand if you're trying to build a business page) as well as a cover picture, and add some engaging text that succinctly tells people about you. You want the overall profile to be attractive to the types of people who you want as followers. Take a look at the profiles of anybody you already admire on TikTok. If you like the style of their bio, then you could create something similar for yourself.
Step 2: Know Who You Wish to Target
Successful TikTokers don’t try to please everybody. You need to create videos that appeal to your core audience. Therefore, you first need to determine who you want that core audience to be.
If you have an existing account, it is worthwhile looking at your current follower list to determine who your “super-fans” are, if you have any. What types of videos do they appear to enjoy best?
If you have created your TikTok profile to represent a business, then you'll want to create videos that will appeal to your target customers. If you are simply an individual, you are likely to want to have followers who have the same interests as yourself. Your followers may well be similar to the types of people that you choose to follow.
Step 3: Create Interesting Videos That Stand Out from the Crowd
You are never going to become successful on TikTok if you remain a lurker, watching other peoples’ videos, possibly even leaving comments, but never uploading your original material.
You will never be more than an also-ran, however, if you limit yourself to uploading bog-standard lip-synch videos, either. Sure, that’s fine for generally-untalented teenagers, just wanting to be part of the crowd, along with their real-life friends. But it is incredibly limiting to your online social success.
If you have any talent in your niche and even a fraction of confidence, make an effort to produce original videos. TikTpk’s young audience probably don't require that you have hidden depths of technical expertise, but they do expect you to at least make an effort if they are going to bother to follow you.
If you look at the list of successful TikTok accounts, you will see that the vast bulk of them made their name by uploading original, exciting videos that appealed to a sizable group of TikTok's users.
Step 4: Establish Your Style
Although TikTok has a general appeal to youth and has more female members than males, everybody is different. You certainly can’t generalize the TikTok audience and assume that everybody is generic and the same.
Therefore you will want to develop a signature style for your posts. For a start, you need to pick one or two categories and ensure most of the videos you make fit into those categories.
Sure, TikTok (and Musical.ly) started as lip-synching platforms. But that doesn't mean that you have to restrict yourself to lip-synching, or even anything musical at all.
Your style will probably reflect two critical things. Firstly, it will relate to a niche that interests you, you know something about, and perhaps even the areas where you display a unique talent. Secondly, it will connect to the type of people you have chosen to target as an audience. This is particularly important for brand accounts, where you will want to focus on making videos for the types of people who you desire to be future customers.
Once you have decided on your style and niche, virtually all of the content you create must match your style. There is no point designing your profile to appeal to young dancers and then uploading videos of you cooking food, for instance.
Of course, TikTok isn’t just videos. People generally find videos of interest by reading the captions that accompany each video. Whenever you create and upload a new video, think carefully about how you caption it, ensuring that you make it appealing to your target audience.
You will also want to ensure that you post your videos regularly and restively frequently. For optimal success, you should try and make at least one video per day for your followers. However, quality is more important than quantity, and particularly if you operate your channel alone, you don’t want to promote more videos than you are capable of making without reducing the quality.
If you set regular times to upload your new videos, your fans will start to look forward to them and will begin looking for them at the times they expect new content.
Step 5: Come Across as Authentic
By creating your signature style, you are effectively creating your TikTok persona. Your fans will quickly discover the real (TikTok) you from your videos. It's essential that you keep coming across the same way. You need always to be an authentic version of yourself.
Your fans choose to like you because they like what they see. They don’t want you to do anything to upset that image. Sure, you can promote products that you genuinely like and believe in. But don't try and hawk irrelevant products, or ones that contradict what you have said in previous videos. This can be particularly problematic if you take on influencer marketing work for competing firms.
Step 6: Take on Challenges
@chipotle TFW guac is free. Online/in-app only 7/31 #GuacDance ♬ The Guacamole Song - Dr. Jean
Challenges are a vital part of TikTok. They may be significant world-wide challenges, like the Tumbleweed Challenge, or something smaller, specific to your niche. By taking part in challenges, you become more relevant to your community. These videos help you become more noticed, and by using the appropriate hashtag, you are providing another way for people to find your content.
Many challenges have thousands of entrants, which means the videos can become a bit repetitive. Therefore it is probably a good idea to add some personal twist to your challenge videos.
Some other well-known TikTok challenges have included the Fake Travel Challenge, where people used everyday objects and pictures to mimic travel photos to comedic effect, the Raindrop Challenge, where people added dramatic visual effects that mimic a rain shower and halted the rain in pattern with music beats.
Step 7: Use Your Other Social Accounts to Promote Your TikTok Videos
If you wish to become a social media influencer, you are likely to predominantly excel on just one or two leading social networks, including perhaps TikTok. That doesn’t mean that you have to ignore the other social networks, however. Most successful influencers have at least some presence on all the main channels.
You can use your other accounts to cross-promote your TikTok material. You can leverage your followers on one platform to help you succeed on another. This is particularly important if you create custom hashtags because it gives you a broader overall audience for people searching for and using that hashtag.
Quite a few TikTokers also run YouTube channels where they splice together highlights videos from TikTok. This also allows you to take advantage of the different audiences. For instance, TikTok videos usually range from 15 seconds to a minute. YouTube, however, regularly hosts much longer videos. You can package numerous related TikTok videos together into one YouTube highlights package.
Step 8: Collaborate with Others in Your Niche
Don’t consider yourself an island on TikTok. It is, after all, a social network, so you must socialize with others. Reply to every comment that people leave on your videos. Watch other peoples’ videos (preferably in your niche) and leave thoughtful, interesting comments there, that can spark an ongoing conversation. Avoid spammy type comments such as "Nice video."
Look for other experts in your niche and try and collaborate with them. You will usually find it easiest to do this with other broadcasters of a similar size to yourself, or perhaps a little bigger. You are far more likely to get agreement from them for collaboration than if you try and work with the big names of TikTok who probably receive many offers every day.
Above All Else – Don’t Buy Fake Followers
The worst mistake that people do when they try to become famous on TikToka and other social sites is to buy followers. Fake followers are, well, fake and phony. They won't watch your videos, they won't comment, and they will never purchase your products. They are of no value to you in any way.
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