Do you want your follower count to reach influencer status? Achieving success on TikTok can change your life. You’ll need a strategy to build your following to experience success with your TikTok account.
As a creator, you need an extensive presence on the platform. With a larger audience, you get more attention to your influencer brand, building awareness and lasting relationships with your target audience.
We curated this list of tips you can implement to help you reach your goal of being an influencer on the world’s fastest-growing social media site. Are you ready? Let’s start!
#1 Know Your Audience
Understanding your target audience is the first step in growing your following on TikTok. Thousands of niches, user demographics, and locations engage with the platform. Choosing the right content to post on TikTok requires a thorough understanding of what content your target audience is consuming on the site.
After identifying your target audience and what they enjoy viewing, you’ll tailor your content strategy to cater to their needs. Your content strategy forms the backbone of your image and personality on the site. Your approach to content creation must be entertaining and engaging to experience the success your desire.
When approaching your awareness strategy for building your following, focus on the quality of your followers, not quantity. Having millions of followers is useless if most of them aren’t interested in your content.
#2 Work with Current Trends
TikTok, like other social media platforms, promotes content riding on current trends. There are dozens of topics trending on TikTok every day. Jumping on the right one could give your account the exposure it needs to go viral, attracting thousands of new followers to your account.
Leveraging trends to gain followers is a great strategy, but that doesn’t mean you should jump on every trending topic. Follow video trends related to your niche and industry, and you’ll receive the best participation from your target audience.
#3 Add Value to Your Followers
When planning your content strategy, ensure you use topics your target audience finds interesting, entertaining, and engaging. If you’re not adding value to the user experience for your followers, they won’t bother hitting the follow button.
Create content adding value to the viewer experience. Plan out your content strategy and use it to brainstorm topics that answer questions posed by your target audience. The goal is to create content that pulls eyeballs to your videos, stopping the user from scrolling.
You have three seconds to catch a viewer’s attention, and by getting to the point with high-value content early in your video, you set the stage for more followers to engage with your content and follow your account.
#4 Use Trending Hashtags
Hashtags are important on all social media platforms, including TikTok. By using trending hashtags in your post, the TikTok algorithm matches your content to searches on the platform and similar trending content. Hashtags can benefit your content strategy or slow it down. It depends on how you use them in your videos.
Use an analysis tool to assess the top hashtags in your niche and for the content you produce. Don’t use generic hashtags. For instance, using the #FYP hashtag won’t favor your video. It’s too generic and doesn’t narrow your target audience enough to impact your view count.
#5 Collaborate and Cross-Promote with Influencers
You must extend your reach to capture as many followers as possible with your content. Reach out to other influencers on the platform and ask them what you can do to collaborate with them. Don’t work with large influencers with millions of followers. Instead, choose “micro-influencers.”
These accounts have between 25k to 100k followers. They won’t demand thousands of dollars from you for a collaboration. Many of them are happy to do a “shoutout for shoutout,” where they introduce your account to their followers, and you do the same for them.
If you have other social media accounts, cross-promote your TikTok content on those channels. For instance, many Instagram Reels share the user’s TikTok content on the platform. Don’t worry about the TikTok watermark in the cross-over videos. It helps to attract people to your TikTok account to see the original version.
#6 Maintain a Consistent Posting Schedule
Design a posting schedule and stick to it. Regularly delivering content to your audience helps you maintain a “top of mind” awareness with your audience. Remember to post at the right time of day. Posting late at night or early in the morning wastes your content if no one is awake to see it.
Dedicated followers expect you to consistently release top-quality content. Start small and build momentum into your posting schedule until you feel comfortable. Don’t stretch yourself, or you’re likely to find your strategy a chore rather than fun. That’s the fast track to burnout on the platform.
#7 Participate in Trending Challenges
The “For You” page on TikTok serves viewers with videos they like based on their past watch history. It personalizes the content feed to improve engagement with the platform. Learning the characteristics and aspects of top-trending videos on the ‘FYP’ page gives you clues to the kind of content that has a chance of going viral.
TikTok built its reputation on challenges and trends. Check the “For You” page every day for emerging trends. Identify the current trending challenges in your niche and create content around them.
Look for challenges your target audience participates in, and leverage them to grow your reach, awareness, and following on the platform. Challenges are fun and engaging and receive massive amounts of attention from viewers commenting and liking the video.
#8 Increase Your Engagement
TikTok is all about engagement. When viewers like and comment on your videos, the TikTok algorithm promotes the content to a wider audience. The more attention you get from your target audience, the better the chance of your video going viral.
If your videos get likes, comments, and shares, the algorithm identifies this activity and promotes your video across the platform. The TikTok algorithm wants to help you go viral, and it doesn’t care if you have ten followers or ten thousand.
The “Duet” and “Stitch” features in the TikTok creators suite help you boost your engagement rates. Use your engagement to answer questions from your target audience regarding your content and your business or sponsors.
Use tact with your replies, and don’t come off as spammy, or people will see you as inauthentic. Authenticity sells on social media. You’ll find your followers appreciate honest engagement more than those creators that come off as fake or phony.
#9 Create a Library of User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is content created by TikTok users. As you unfold your content strategy, you’ll find you collect a large amount of UGC, increasing your engagement with your target audience and trust in your brand.
Start challenges or host a contest, and you’ll find the UGC starts piling up. TikTok doesn’t penalize you for using this content, and it’s beneficial to your videos to include it. Don’t plaster UGC across your video. Focus on your original content and use UGC as an additional effect in your videos.
#10 Leverage Technology
Growing your following using an organic strategy is the best method for improving engagement and landing more followers. If you’re starting out on the platform, consider implementing technology tools. Run this software alongside your organic strategy to supercharge your follower adoption.
Social-Viral
This tool allows you to purchase TikTok followers at low rates. You get instant access to more followers in your target audience and the option to buy likes and views on your videos.
Social Buddy
This tool provides advanced targeting strategies that help locate followers interested in your content. Target prospective followers based on relevant hashtags, niche or industry, competitors, and complementary accounts, to find users in your target audience.
As a warning, TikTok will ban your account if they detect you using third-party tools to grow your followers. Be careful with what you implement, and stick to an organic growth strategy where possible.
In Closing – Stay Persistent and Don’t Give Up
It’s rare for TikTok users to experience success in the first few months of using the platform. Many creators give up on their influencer dreams a few videos before they hit the inflection point that would propel them to superstardom.
Don’t give up. Keep producing content, and eventually, you’ll break through. Each tip in this post is critical to your strategy’s success on TikTok and for gaining followers on the platform. Start by implementing each suggestion individually. Check your results before including the next step to growing your following.
Implementing too many strategies at once may confuse you about what’s working and where you should concentrate your efforts. Find when your users are most active, and publish content at optimal times to receive the best exposure for your videos.
Provided you’re persistent with your strategy, you’ll eventually start to experience traction on your account. All it takes is one viral moment on TikTok to experience success with the platform. Don’t give up. You never know. You could be one video away from going viral.
