Your biggest questions about TikTok marketing answered

The TikTok hype is real and TikTok is the real deal. If until now, many dismissed TikTok thinking it was a playground for teens, marketers are now waking up and realizing that that is the place to be! Why? Because there are currently 1 billion monthly active users on TikTok (this does not include China as they have a different app). Out of these, over 60% are over the age of 20 and approximately 30% are over the age of 30. In short, if your target audience includes anyone between the ages of 13 and 60, you should be on TikTok right now. Need inspiration on launching your TikTok strategy? Click here for 12 advanced TikTok strategies. Want to know how to succeed on TikTok? Click here. Without further ado, here are the most important TikTok facts you need to know, as disclosed by Rachel Pedersen, known as the “queen of social media” with over 1 million TikTok followers.

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Niching down

You do not need to niche down. Controversial, right? According to Rachel, few people with large following support the idea of niching down. Although niching down can help you grow fast in the beginning, it often leads to a ceiling. Why? Because it was transactional. Instead, Rachel recommends building your niche around you. We are multi-passionate humans, complex beings sometimes walking contradictions. YOU are the niche and you get to just be you, all facets of you. This is no longer transactional. And when you get all the interests together, that’s where you get the raving fans.

Should you have different profiles for different businesses?

The only time when Rachel recommends having multiple accounts is if you have two different businesses that cannot have an overlap in the audience i.e. you cannot market both from the same account. So if let’s say you run a branding and marketing agency and you are also an intuitive business coach as well as a confidence coach for women, you can market everything from the same account - it works if there are similar overlaps

Should you have a creator or business account?

This is up to you, yet it seems the general recommendation is to go for the creator account. You can still go viral with the business account but the pros do not outweigh the cons until the platform makes it mandatory that all businesses use business accounts. Plus, you can run spark ads without a business account (spark ads refer to taking an organic regular TikTok and running traffic to it.)

Tip: the best TikTok ads start out as organic posts. If the video flopped organically, it will flat as an ad.

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How TikTok works?

TikTok uses really advanced AI. Sure, when done right, text on the screen helps. But the algorithm is getting so good that it identifies what is in the video. So if you stand in front of a bookcase, TikTok will show your content to people who like books in their content. In Rachel’s case, there is no accident that her background shows awards, Youtube Play Button, and books. (P.S. If you are new to TikTok, don’t overthink this.)

In terms of keeping people engaged when teaching, it is useful to learn some presenting tricks that naturally pull people in such as:

- Keep the hands above waist level. This makes the conversation naturally more dynamic and people assume you have more energy

- When you want to make a point, you don’t just scan a room, you look into the camera.

- The louder you talk, go further from the camera; if you need to make a point, get closer to the camera and whisper-When you film you can also get your phone closer/further and change angles while filming in one go

- Attention interrupts, and attention resets work really well e.g. “what do you think about that? Comment and let me know”

- If you make a mistake just roll with it
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Viral content, quality content, and business growth

Another key lesson is that although it can be easy to go viral (just create controversy), viral does not always matter in terms of business growth. To illustrate this point, Rachel’s workshop guest Kelly Sturtevant gives an example of one of her videos that had 1.9M views but didn’t bring her any leads since it was neither related to her business nor audience. Another guest, Tereza Toledo said she also had multiple videos going viral but since they had nothing to do with her business, there or no leads and no followers, just likes and comments.

The key is to create content that talks to your target audience and stick with it even if the numbers are not huge because there are sufficient cases of leads reaching out directly without having priorly commented on the creator's content. That also means that you can have more leads coming from a smaller audience that is targeted to your business than from a much large audience that has nothing to do with your offer.

Now the problem with “quality content” is that most people don’t know what quality is. What “quality” is to you may not be “quality” to someone else. On TikTok, the viewers are the ones to decide whether your video was good enough or not. So you might find yourself in a situation where you share an advanced lesson that your audience will find “boring” or where you share a very basic hashtag list that your audience will love! In this regard, you focus on creating and let the viewers decide what content they want to rave about.

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Content Creation

How many TikTok should you post per day Monday to Friday?

Rachel presented cases of different influencers who posted 1 video per day, or any number between 1-5/day and got good results. The conclusion is that there is no magic number, rather “whatever is sustainable is the good number”. The recommendation is initially to create the habit of publishing 3-5 videos per week, get the data, fail and learn fast then move to 1-3 or 3-5 per day.  For the cherry on the top, Rachel says she grows fastest when she posts 10 TikToks at a time.

Tip: If you post multiple per day and have zero or low reach, don’t panic, that’s normal as it will take a few days for the algorithm to kick in.

Should you post on weekends? One of her Rachel guests mentioned that she rarely posts on weekends as the return on investment is not good.  This happens because people post a lot on weekends but do not consume as much. Instead, she recommends taking the weekend off to recharge for the coming week.

Should you have a backlog of content or create everything in real-time?

This is up to you. You know your style of working best. But if you prefer to work as you go, it is good to have some backlog to have on a rainy day. As for clients, it is recommended to have them create in batch.Top Tip: do what you can consistently do. Consistency will win over burning bright for one week

If you haven’t been consistent on TikTok,  just get started now. Start with trends easy to do, and post your best tips/nuggets/ quick shorts. Just post. Pretend like you never left and start being consistent from there.

You've got this! 😎
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👉 Up next: 12 exclusive strategies to crush it on TikTok‍

👉 Next: TikTok Marketing Tactics That Work

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