TikTok Tips and Tricks for Businesses

Tip 1: Make sure your profile is looking good

Besides making an account, setting up your profile should be the first step for any business looking to start on TikTok. TikTok has a relatively similar profile layout to other social media, consisting of three major elements: a profile image, a bio, and a link. Here are some tips for all of them.

Profile image: Your profile image needs to be eye-catching and memorable, but most importantly, it needs to represent your business well. Perhaps it can be the business logo, or a mascot if you have one. Pay attention to the colours and image size, and make sure your profile image is cropped at the right size so that it looks nice visually. Whatever you do though, just make sure it represents what your business is all about.

Bio: For TikTok, you only have 80 characters worth of space in your bio. True to the short form nature of TikTok, that’s not a lot of space. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your bio counts. For some ideas, you could include your business’ tag line, a very brief description of what your business does, or maybe even something that’s more outside of the box.

URL: For every TikTok profile, you can have a single clickable link. Just like the other two sections, since you only have one, make it count! A solid idea would be to link your business’ website’s landing page. But depending on the business, there are a lot of other places you could link to. Perhaps you want to promote your profile on a different social media; you can link your page there. Or, perhaps you have a sale going on. You can use your link to help promote the sale. Even though you only have one link, who says you can’t change it up a little to fit what you need at the time?

Tip 2: Make some videos

OK, I’ll admit, there’s more to it than just making some videos. Here are some tips you’ll want to consider when you make a video to post to TikTok.

60 second time limit: On TikTok, every video can be 60 seconds long; exactly one minute. However, it’s a good idea to not actually reach that time limit. If you can make your videos shorter, it’ll be far better for the algorithm. That’s because shorter videos will mean that more people will be completing your video before they click off, rather than only making it halfway through a 60 second video. Additionally, giving yourself a shorter time frame forces you to make content that is snappier and more to the point; just what TikTok likes.

Eye-catches: TikTok is a competition for eyeballs and attention. You want your business to be able to compete with the others, and to do this, you’ll want to include something attention grabbing very early on in the video. There are a few ways you can do this. You could start your video by putting a short, funny, clip out of context in the beginning, making the viewer want to keep watching to see how it happened. You can also use text overlays, music, or anything else that you think could get people’s attention to your video.

Audio: You’ll probably want to use a viral song trend for your audio. According to one of TikTok’s reports, 68% of it’s users remember a brand more when that brand uses a song they like in one of their videos. Not only getting the attention of others, but also being able to remain in people’s minds, is huge for a business. Moreover, 62% have also reported that using trending audio makes them more interested in the brand. There are a multitude of ways you can find out which audio clips are trending right now. In TikTok’s search bar, you could search up keywords like ‘trending’, or you could even scroll through your own For You page and just see what people are using.

Captions: In your caption, there are two key points you’ll want to hit. The first is to incorporate any keywords that are relevant to your video. This will tell the algorithm what your video is about, as well as help boost it in the algorithm. The second thing is, of course, hashtags. Hashtags are very important, since they help categorise what content you post, help others find it, and tell the algorithm that your video is relevant to a hashtag. We’ll discuss hashtags a little bit more in detail later on in the article. Just make sure to also make your caption something eye-catching and interesting.

Tip 3: Know your competitors

Tip 4: Make good use of trending hashtags

If your business is able to jump on trends well, it’ll be a great opportunity to not only give your business more publicity, but also to show to everyone just what your brand is about. It’ll show off your business’ identity; it’s personality. This is great for any business, since you’ll want to seem relatable and approachable to the public.

Tip 5: Know the algorithm well

TikTok has a number of factors that influence it’s algorithm. The first of those factors is the device you’re using, as well as the account settings. This takes into account what type of device you’re using, your device’s country settings, as well as your language preferences. Of course, this is so that TikTok can show you content relevant to where you live, as well as in the language(s) that you prefer to speak in.

The second type of factor is the information about the video. This is where your business can have a lot of influence. TikTok looks at captions for keywords, hashtags to find out about the video content, and audio, to find out if it’s using an audio that’s doing well, and would thus be appropriate for a more general audience. If your business can master all three of these factors, the algorithm will love you.

Finally, there is also your own behaviour while on your account. This would cover things like the videos you like, who you follow, whose content you spend the most time watching, and what sort of videos you add to your favourites. This is useful knowledge for any business on TikTok to have, since it can prove to be great information on your audience.