Are you like me… deliberating about getting on the TikTok train to accelerate your business?
Well this message resonated with me:
“As a business owner, you already know that if you wait to begin until you have it all figured out – you’ll be waiting a very long time. You just have to jump in and get started. The same is true with TikTok. Because our massive audience won’t wait – they’re looking for the new and the next right now, shopping and buying and specifically seeking out small businesses to support.”
In August this year, I decided to hold myself accountable to my small business audience and I committed that I would have my business TikTok account set up that month and then start advertising in September. I am pleased to say that I did just that! Check it out here.
My first video was 60 secs and I boosted it with $14.99 (with TikTok coins), as you can see I received 936 views.
My other 3 videos were all 15 secs and these were organic reach.
I consulted some TikTok experts (Generation Z) regarding improvements to my videos and their tips were:
- Use the countdown timer
- Don’t use the stickers (Generation Z are all about authenticity so the stickers don’t work for them. I believe if you have an older audience then you can add in stickers for some fun).
- Be authentic – use the natural filter
- What is your first line that says – “stop scrolling right now…”, start with a bang eg “wait…” or “before you scroll…”
- Use different fonts but only one colour
- What are you doing that makes you different?
- Re-purpose your videos on Instagram and Facebook
- When you add keywords in your caption and you see hashtag suggestions with view counts, don’t go for the popular hashtags as your content will be in competition with the other millions of videos in that space – stick with lower competition hashtags (around 10,000 views) while you’re still growing.
- Always put #fyp and #foryoupage in your videos for further reach / discovery
- Get influencers with larger followings or even friends to repost your TikToks
Besides these great tips from ‘Generation Z’, TikTok has provided some top tips on how to get started:
- Completing the full details of your Business Account to maximize your discoverability.
- Using the Small Business Resource Center for inspiration and trends data.
- For those Shopify store owners, utilizing the TikTok integration to create promotions within your Shopify dashboard.
- Connecting with influencers on TikTok’s Creator Marketplace for promotional partnerships.
Remember that for any social marketing to have a social content strategy in place.
New TikTok shopping features – coming soon
If you are still deliberating 🧐 on getting onto TikTok here is a look into the future of TikTok’s shopping features that are great for small business owners to grow their online business. It’s worth putting TikTok into your planning for growth.
TikTok have 6 shopping features that they are rolling out with some of their new partnerships. Practical eCommerce’s Sig Ueland has written a great on all of these features:
- Shopping so that business owners can integrate their product feed into the app like Google Shopping and Facebook product catalogs
- Product links – you can add product links to your video and viewers can click straight through to purchase a product
- Collection ads – these ads are product cards that can been seen in ‘in-feed’ ads
- Dynamic showcase ads – these integrate both your catalog feed and the ‘shakr’ templates to dynamic serve ads and optimize based on performance
- Live shopping
- Lead generation
TikTok have partnered with great businesses like, Shopify, Square, Shakr, Zapier and Productsup to deliver a compelling platform for small business. You can read more on these features in this article.
