Social media apps do more than entertain and connect us. Social media has become our go-to source even for news and information, and a hub for colleagues or schoolmates in the wake of a global pandemic.
It has also become one of the greatest marketing tools for businesses in this digital age.
In fact, if you have a business, you need to have brand territory on social media platforms.
If you want to be successful as a brand, you will leverage social media optimization (SMO) along with search engine optimization (SEO).
Social media marketing can bring your revenues a mile further.
Firstly, you reach a wider audience because of its 49% penetration of the global population.
There are almost 3.81 billion monthly active users (MAU), and to have a brand position on social media platforms is but sensible. Out of that, 3.76 billion access social media through mobile phones.
Secondly, you can engage with your audience more. Connection and community are social media trends that businesses can optimise.
Communities that gravitate towards each other based on similar interests, backgrounds, careers, political views, and the like, form these social media communities to stay connected, get and share information, and build relationships.
Digital marketers love this because they can specifically target the groups that belong to their niche and concentrate engagements and campaigns on them.
Third, social media is a great avenue to build customer relationships. It helps you foster long-term relationships with your client because social media engagements are more personal than website engagements.
On your social media platforms, your customers see a less-serious, more intimate side of your brand.
Through posts, stories, and social sharing, a community that believes in your brand will grow around you.
It continues to build brand awareness, strengthens brand positioning, and boosts conversions and sales. 71% of customers who have a positive experience with a brand on any social media channel will likely recommend the brand to their circle of family and friends.
Lastly, social media marketing is a cost-effective way to establish brand authority. Brand awareness and territory are so easy to build through social media.
There is a chance to go viral or trend even with a single post. Although this is not enough to sustain brand authority, it is a good launching pad.
Even if you do not go viral, consistently producing high-quality content that solves problems can help you engage with social media users and boost your conversion.
It is why marketing on social media is important to boost online business.
Here are the top social media apps for marketing that will help along with that.
13 TikTok Marketing Best Practices and Hacks
Social media sites and mobile apps are digital marketing powerhouses. No wonder brands spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars promoting themselves on these platforms.
Already, we have discussed the main social media apps and their respective statistics.
Let’s now shift gears and look at 13 TikTok marketing best practices and hacks you can count on to enhance your brand awareness efforts and supercharge its growth rate.
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Ride Current TikTok Trends
TikTok is arguably the fastest social media platform today, as evident from its supersonic growth rate in the last three years. Visibility and engagement are everything when doing digital marketing on social media sites.
Based on this fact, it’s imperative to ride current TikTok trends to increase your video’s reach and spur engagement with the target audience. One sure way of doing this is by being on the lookout for trending hashtags.
Include the hashtags in your video descriptions to increase their discoverability. Note that trends are short-lived, so make sure you take full advantage of them before they go stale. Resist the urge to mimic the trending videos; instead, create your versions from scratch to stand out from the crowd.
Like other social media platforms, TikTok has an algorithm that determines which content is displayed to the different user groups. The algorithm prioritises content based on the number of views and comments accrued over time.
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Strike a Balance between Promoting Your Brand and Entertaining Followers
Unlike before, you cannot afford to bombard your target customers with content that only aims to generate sales.
Today, online customers gravitate towards businesses that not only promote themselves but also, in the process, offer valuable information.
Therefore, strike a balance between promoting your brand and entertaining followers. If prospects see a promotional video too often, the viewers will soon start to skip it.
The most successful brands that use TikTok for marking aim at entertaining and informing their customers about their offers before showing them ads. This strategy works like a charm as it piques the customers’ attention and interest in the brand long before they see the ad.
Use content such as tutorials to inform the customers how your service or products work.
Respond to comments to start a conversation and boost the chances of your videos getting noticed by the algorithm and going viral.
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Boost Brand Awareness through Partnerships
Like other digital marketing strategies, there is a learning curve that you have to go through during the initial stages. Don’t expect to become a TikTok sensation overnight.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel; you can boost your brand awareness through partnerships. TikTok is a dedicated Creator Marketplace that you can leverage to connect with industry leaders and content creators whose audiences match your ideal customers.
Partnering with one or more experts will help you gain mileage on this competitive social media app by creating concise videos that are entertaining, relevant to the audience, and capable of moving the needle.
Concisely, content creators will help your in-house marketing team scale up your brand and compete effectively with other industry leaders. Also, consider bringing on board influencers to increase your content reach further.
One of the benefits of working with influencers is that they already have followers who are genuinely interested in your niche.
Thus, they can create authentic content relatable to potential customers and more knowledgeable about the platform’s algorithm.
Your experience with industry leaders and influencers will guide your team in the right direction and help them jump hurdles that other brands cannot circumvent.
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Leverage Full-Screen Focus
Numerous research studies have proven that most TikTok users prefer watching videos in portrait mode.
Increase views by making sure that your videos are in the 9:16 format.
This format ensures that the video covers the whole screen, conveying the intended message more effectively than the landscape mode.
Before the video goes live, check how it’s displayed on different screen sizes to offer the same quality video watching experience.
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Include CTA (call to action) in Ads
The call to action informs potential customers of the specific actions they should take after watching the video ad. We recommend displaying them within the TikTok video ad to create a direct connection with prospects.
Otherwise, the viewers won’t know which action they should take after watching the video if there is no CTA. You will also lose hundreds of potential customers to competitors whose ads have CTAs.
The buttons can also be used to show additional information about the product/service, find a location, shop, and more – it all depends on the goals of your TikTok marketing campaign.
Clickable buttons also have an immense potential to increase organic traffic to your website. They also create a deep and interactive experience for the ad viewers as they go beyond the content in the short video ad.
In a nutshell, CTA increases campaign conversion rate and is the secret ingredient for creating high-performing TikTok video ads. Track the customers who click on the buttons and, if possible, capture their data, such as email addresses.
The information will help enhance your other marketing strategies, such as email marketing and ensure that you only reach out to people who are genuinely interested in your brand.
Borrow a leaf from the #GoodVibeMessenger New Year’s campaign by Starbucks to get maximum ROI from TikTok.
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Post Authentic Content
Savvy online consumers can smell unauthentic content from a mile away. You don’t want to ruin your business reputation by posting erroneous content that’s only meant to trick prospects into buying your product or subscribing to your service.
The secret to staying relevant on TikTok is by posting only authentic content. This kind of content will have a major positive impact on your brand’s visibility and campaign success.
Monitor the engagement levels achieved from different content to know what works best for your brand and what should be removed from the campaign. Use the platform’s algorithm and analytics page to benchmark the number of impressions different videos achieve.
During the first weeks and months of marketing via TikTok, don’t be afraid of experimenting with different content types and formats. It’s the only way to know what resonates with the targeted customers.
More importantly, learn from your mistakes and reach out to industry leaders who have mastered the art of TikTok marketing to get optimal results.
Earlier on, we mentioned the need to bring on board industry leaders. Be open-minded when dealing with them, as they are more conversant with the platform than you.
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Master Closed Captioning
Not everyone who watches your videos can hear what is said. Make your videos more relatable and accessible to more people by adding captions. Using captions alongside CTA buttons will make your content different from the rest and more memorable.
In addition, it enables viewers who prefer scrolling through the feed with no sound to get the message and take the desired action without unmuting.
Here is a YouTube video on how to add captions to TikTok videos.
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Add a Sense of Humour and Creativity
We know you are laser-focused on generating sales via TikTok, but that’s no excuse for posting boring videos that only serve this purpose.
Engage more with potential customers by adding humour and creativity to your TikTok videos. Use background information about your audience to know which kind of humorous content is capable of auguring well with them.
Fun and playful videos will make your brand and products more memorable. Such videos get more views and comments than ordinary videos. They also have a high potential of going viral, expanding your clientele without costing you an arm and a leg.
The bottom line is that TikTok users prefer and expect to see funny and light-hearted videos. If you are not convinced, spend five minutes on TikTok and note ads that stand out and appeal to you.
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What’s the Ideal TikTok Video Length?
This is one of the most common questions that we get from our clients when consulting about TikTok marketing.
Timing is everything if you want your TikTok videos to grow your business effectively. Videos that are too short often contain a message that is not clear and often vague. On the other hand, videos that are too long easily lose viewers’ interest and record low engagement levels.
The ideal length of a TikTok video is 7 – 15 seconds. Your best bet is hovering around the 15 seconds mark to avoid your message being unclear or vague. With human attention spans getting shorter, you risk losing your audience’s attention if your videos are longer than 15 seconds.
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Use Different Backdrops
Based on the experience we have with different marketing brands on TikTok, the top-performing ads are those that use different backdrops. The settings are regularly changed to make the ads visible to different segments of customers and increase engagement.
Experiment with different viewpoints, scenery, and camera angles to make your ads more appealing and diverse. Different scenes will pique potential customers’ interests and make the message memorable.
The human brain processes visuals faster and more efficiently than text. Therefore, the more visually appealing your ads are, the more effective they will be in creating a buzz on TikTok and generating sales.
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Use Storytelling to Communicate Better
As Sawyer Hartman and other industrious vloggers and filmmakers noted, the key to getting the most results from social media is using storytelling to communicate your brand vision and goals.
Storytelling will help you grasp the attention of the audience. Those who have never heard about your brand will spring into action and click on the CTA buttons or visit your website to learn more. Use Sawyer’s strategy of including text overlays in videos to grab the audience’s attention.
The best text overlays are the ones that address the target customers’ concerns and fears. Use them at the start of the videos to get their attention, then go ahead to explain the steps they should take to solve the problem.
Make sure that the text resonates with the message that you intend to pass to your audience. If not, you will spend hundreds of hours creating videos and get little or no results.
If you are unsure which text to use, imagine yourself as the target viewer relaxing in your living room watching the video with the sound off.
Which text can enable you to tell the story and convince them to turn on sound and respond positively to the video either by leaving a comment, liking, or sharing the video?
Concisely, adding text to TikTok videos is one of the most effective ways of stopping scrollers from ignoring your videos.
It will also make the videos relatable to people with hearing impairments.
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Post-Fresh Videos More Often
Like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram marketing, you should post more frequently to keep the audience entertained, engaged, and interested in your brand.
Chriselle is a perfect example of a successful TikToker who gained traction by posting at least 5 different videos per day.
Use your creativity to create more videos to supercharge your social media content marketing strategy. The more videos you post, the more ideas you will get about your audience’s interests, needs, and expectations.
It takes a lot of experimentation to know which type of content makes your audience laugh. Posting more regularly will improve your TikTok account performance.
The TikTok algorithm will notice the new posting frequency and reward you with more visibility in the news feed.
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Don’t Give Up
The above TikTok hacks will point you in the right direction, but they don’t guarantee success in a fortnight.
It’s only after months of consistent posting that most of the famous TikTokers got the limelight.
So, don’t give up and focus on the main goal –to generate sales and qualified leads through TikTok marketing.
TikTok marketing is the future, and you cannot afford to ignore this fast-growing social media platform. Contact the MediaOne Marketing team today to get professional help on how to market your brand on this platform.
Our team has years of experience in social media marketing and will give unwavering attention to your campaign.
Social media marketing or social selling is a recent eCommerce trend. 91% of retail brands are on a couple of social media platforms, at least. Most brands serve a wide range of age demographics.
They tend to target more platforms for marketing strategies.
A significant number of business start-ups and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) also use social media for marketing. In fact, 81% of SMEs use social media for brand promotion.
Social media is so popular that websites are getting lots of leads from it. Lead generation is the strategy employed by marketers to gain prospects and convert them to leads or customers.
Through social media platforms, users can click through to your site and increase your organic traffic.
Marketers focus on platforms that hit the target demographics for most of the business they are handling.
See the best social media apps for marketing that every marketer must master:
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TikTok
TikTok comes first on this list because of its phenomenal increase amid the pandemic.
As doors to businesses and schools closed, and people were encouraged to stay at home for their safety, TikTok’s popularity surged fast.
Video-content sharing apps like TikTok became a sure hit with social media users under lockdown. TikTok not just eased people’s boredom but filled the need to create and be productive at a time when the outside world stood still.
Video content is more engaging than traditional content, so this is not surprising. More information can be packed into a minute of video.
Even people who lost their jobs in the wake of the pandemic upgraded their resumes to video resumes which got them hired more efficiently.
The sudden upsurge of demand for video content has fueled TikTok’s popularity.
Its short-form videos brought humour and great enjoyment to homes that were under a lot of stress and anxiety due to the global crisis.
TikTok now has 800 million monthly active users, 115 million of which were gained in March 2020 alone.
Brands have flocked to TikTok to continue staying in touch with their target market. Physical and social distancing was compensated with increased social media engagements and stronger online connections.
As brands sought to be one with the community through social media platforms like TikTok, they are being rewarded with a noticeable upsurge in brand authority and conversion.
In any case, pandemic or no pandemic, greater engagement in the social media world always translates to better brand positioning and sales.
TikTok thrives on UGC (User-Generated Content) if you are thinking of optimizing TikTok for your social media marketing strategies, master how the TikTok app works.
Take trending challenges and make original and fun videos that will make an impact on your target market while communicating with you are your brand is about.
Take advantage of TikTok advertising through Infeed Native Content, Hashtag Challenge, Branded Lenses, and even Brand Takeover.
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- Infeed Native Content: stories, where you can attach downloads of apps and backlinking of websites.
- Hashtag Challenges: the hashtags in its promotions help you go viral through and get more engagement.
- Branded Lenses: 2D and 3D glasses for viewing videos
- Brand Takeovers: you can take over TikTok for a day and promote your brand with images, videos, GIFs, and selected hashtag challenges. You are also allowed to include backlinks to your videos that users can click through your landing page or site.
You can easily download this app from Appstore, and Google Play. For those using Microsoft Windows 10, you do not need to run the app on an Android emulator.
Just go to the Microsoft store, download “TikTok,” and you can TikTok from your Microsoft device as well.
Facebook is one of the longest-running, most successful, and highly downloaded social media apps in the world to date.
Its curated content of posts, images, videos, stories, news and information, live feed, games, and so much more have brought a total of 2.5 billion monthly active users to the app.
Facebook’s popularity has also elevated small businesses that do marketing primarily on social media.
Even during the massive lockdown in different countries, some people found the Facebook marketplace as a chance to bounce back from job loss or the closing of brick-and-mortar stores. eCommerce boomed even more amid the pandemic.
Facebook is great for marketers to use due to its vast number of users covering almost all demographics by age, gender, location, work, or school, among others.
Small niche marketers use “Groups” where people with similar interests, backgrounds, or demographic come together to stay informed and stay connected with like-minded people.
Brands can engage with these specific niches, and establish their brand identity and territory, which also increases organic content through social media engagements and click-through to websites.
YouTube is still the trendiest video content and video-streaming platform in social media.
YouTube’s revenues were at $4.04 billion in the wake of the global pandemic. Its YouTube’s most popular YouTube channels increased to over 100 million DAU or daily active users.
YouTube alone has access to Google’s advertising platform because it is owned by Google. Just like Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page), YouTube also relies on keywords to rank its different channels on its very own SERP.
The importance of video content in SEO and SMO must be optimized by marketers if they want to create greater brand awareness for their business.
Instagram is now owned by Facebook and has 1 billion daily active users as of date.
Instagram was launched in 2010 and set the trend for multiple filters and high-quality, creative images generated by users themselves.
It has evolved into one of the social media’s most reliable apps to engage with the generation that has the highest purchase power right now—millennials.
Brands can now run advertisements on the platform, much like running paid ads on Facebook. In fact, through Creator Studio, marketers can run ads harmoniously on both apps and get metric reports in the same place.
One of its breakthrough products recently is its “stories” feature and IGTV, which marketers optimized for lead generation, engagements, and conversions.
Twitter is the ideal platform for social media engagements because it allows users and brands more freedom to build relationships and engagements.
Its @mentions, retweets, and DMs or direct messages are great marketing tools for 1:1 engagement.
This app is best to use for brands aiming at teens and younger millennials, mostly of the male demographic. There is no one formula to go viral or trend on Twitter through hashtags, but if a brand hits that, it boosts brand awareness and drives conversions beyond expectations.
Brands also need to be creative in compelling their audience to click through links or posts with limited characters. This kind of short-form content works for Twitter well as it serves a highly active, easily bored demographic.
Twitter reaches 330 million monthly active users, of which 145 million are daily active users. Among their users, 63% are between 35 and 65.
Pinterest is the virtual bulletin board that lets you “pin” images, short videos, GIFs, and links to websites of things you love.
During the pandemic, there was a rise in infographics and how-to-videos, something Pinterest is best known for. 32 million new users downloaded Pinterest.
Its current subscribers are 367 million monthly active users.
Pinterest notes in a letter to its shareholders that people on the app were searching for “…practical solutions on how to educate and entertain their kids; how to clean during quarantine; what food to put in the pantry and how to make masks..” and some “future-oriented interests” like a future vacation or travel plans.
Use Pinterest to get your material out there. Properly tag your posts, so the right people from the right niche find them.
Once users click the pin, they get directed to another Pinterest window where they can either pin your post, share it, or click through your website.
So, make sure you use compelling images and short videos to signal to users your link is worth clicking through.
LinkedIn is 575-million-user strong, 260 million of which are monthly active users. The app is perfect for those whose target market is professionals and entrepreneurs. It is well-used by B2C and B2B companies that market to this niche.
For example, Software, a B2B software company, is active on LinkedIn, where it shares blog posts that support its community on the app.
The demographic of its consumers and followers are enterprises, other corporate accounts, and wholesale retailers. Software posts articles related to software, technology, and even Digital Marketing. These niches are where most of its clients are a part.
Regarding modern technology and social media, Software notes:
“The most remarkable change is in how we communicate with each other, and one of technology’s greatest boons, social media, has undoubtedly overtaken traditional methods of communication… It revolutionized our world by opening wide avenues, even for ordinary people to get information quickly and share content on a global scale.”
Social media now has a secure footing, with 49% of the world’s 7.75 billion population.
Marketers need to take advantage of the influence social media has and put it to good use for their business or businesses.
Marketers need to choose the best social media apps that best reach their target market.
Determine the most appropriate kind of content for the apps and start creating high-quality content that makes an impact.
Set your social media marketing strategies at work and see your brand name and position improve.
Be that brand that people can trust, can connect well with, and best relate to.
CO-AUTHOR’S BIO
Mayleen Meñez
Mayleen Meñez worked for seven years in TV and Radio production, and also as a Graphic Artist/Editor. Finding her true passion, she devoted 15 years to NGO and community development work, where she experienced being a coordinator and teacher, travelling both in the Philippines and countries in Asia. She homeschools her three kids and reinvents Filipino dishes in her spare time. Writing has always been a hobby and pursuit, and she recently added content writing with https://www.softvire.com.au/ and https://www.softvire.co.nz/ up her sleeve, while preparing for her next adventure in the nations.
