TikTok is one of the world’s fastest-growing social media platforms, with over 1 billion active users globally. It allows users to create and share short-form videos, often set to music. In just a few years, TikTok has become a cultural phenomenon and has captured the attention of younger demographics. With its algorithmic “For You” feed, TikTok can quickly turn everyday users into viral sensations and internet celebrities.
For brands and marketers, TikTok represents an enticing new channel to connect with audiences, particularly Gen Z. But first, brands need to collect and analyze TikTok data to truly understand user behavior and preferences on the platform. Collecting rich TikTok data can help brands identify influencers to partner with, learn about trending sounds and viral video strategies, conduct audience research, monitor brand mentions, and ultimately create content engineered for success on TikTok. With the platform’s explosive growth showing no signs of slowing down, brands are eager to tap into the TikTok data goldmine. According to Backlinko, TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide. Compiling data directly from the source allows brands to maximize their TikTok presence
TikTok’s Data Privacy Policies
TikTok’s privacy policy outlines how the platform collects, uses, shares, and protects user data. Some key aspects of TikTok’s privacy policy include:
TikTok collects various types of user data including username, device information, location information, and any content users upload like videos, comments, or messages. According to the privacy policy, this data may be used for purposes like “developing or improving” TikTok’s products and services, showing users targeted ads, enforcing terms of service, and preventing harm.
Users have some control over how their data is shared. The privacy settings allow users to make their videos public, friends-only, or private. Users can also choose whether or not to share their video view history and search history with TikTok.
TikTok may share user data with third parties for business purposes like advertising, fraud prevention, or corporate transactions. However, the privacy policy states TikTok will not sell or rent user data to third parties.
While TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, the privacy policy states TikTok stores international user data in data centers located outside of China.
Understanding TikTok’s data privacy policies and terms of use is an important first step for anyone looking to collect TikTok data ethically and legally.
Web Scraping TikTok Data
One way to collect public data from TikTok is through web scraping. Web scraping involves using automated tools to extract data from TikTok’s public web pages and APIs. This can be done legally as long as it does not violate TikTok’s Terms of Service. According to Reddit users, web scraping TikTok data for academic research purposes does not break TikTok’s Terms as long as it’s done discreetly and not abused (source).
There are many open source tools available for scraping TikTok data, such as TikTok-Scraper (source). These tools allow extracting public data like video URLs, descriptions, number of likes, shares, comments, etc. The data can then be analyzed to gain insights into trending content, influencers, audiences, and more. However, scraping should be done carefully to avoid overloading TikTok’s servers and violating usage limits.
Overall, web scraping presents a feasible option for researchers to legally gather TikTok data at scale for analysis. However, ethics and privacy considerations should be made when collecting and using such data.
TikTok APIs
TikTok provides developers with various APIs to help integrate TikTok functionality into other apps and services. The main APIs offered by TikTok are:
The Display API – Allows apps to display TikTok videos and creator profiles. This can enable features like embedding TikTok content in other sites or apps. See overview of the Display API.
The Tulip API – Provides methods for apps to post content to TikTok programmatically on behalf of creators. This facilitates cross-posting content between platforms. See Tulip API documentation.
The Open API – Gives access to public TikTok data like user profiles, hashtags, music, and hashtag challenges. This allows for analytics and aggregating TikTok data. See Open API overview.
The User Token API – Enables user authentication for apps using TikTok accounts. This allows apps to connect users while respecting data privacy. See User Token API summary.
Overall, TikTok’s developer APIs provide capabilities to display, post, analyze, and authenticate using TikTok platform features and data. These APIs form the basis for building apps and services integrated with TikTok.
Third-Party TikTok Analytics Tools
While TikTok provides some basic analytics within its Creator Portal, many users turn to third-party analytics tools to gain more in-depth data and insights. Some popular options include:
HypeAuditor – This AI-powered platform analyzes TikTok accounts and helps identify fraudulent engagement. It provides metrics on followers, engagement rates, top videos, mentions, and more.
Popsters – Popsters offers real-time analytics on hashtags, sounds, challenges, and influencers. You can benchmark performance and track trends over time.
Socialinsider – This tool tracks analytics for multiple social platforms including TikTok. It provides user demographics, engagement metrics, competitor analysis, and campaign reporting.
Iconosquare – Useful for tracking your own TikTok account stats. Iconosquare provides data on views, likes, comments, followers, and more.
Influencer Marketing Hub – Offers a free TikTok analytics tool to analyze profiles and benchmark performance. Also includes influencer search tools.
These third-party analytics platforms help unlock more robust data from TikTok. They enable tracking performance over time, conducting competitor research, identifying key influencers, and optimizing content strategy.
Collecting TikTok User Insights
TikTok provides creators with access to important demographic data and engagement metrics for their audience through the Creator Portal analytics dashboard (Understanding your analytics | Creator Portal). This includes information like follower count, gender, age range, top countries, devices used, and content consumption times.
The analytics dashboard provides an overview of audience interests based on hashtag performance. This allows creators to better understand what types of content resonate most with their followers. You can also view more granular metrics like video views, likes, comments, and shares for each individual post.
Third-party analytics tools like Countik (Free TikTok Analytics Tool) can provide additional demographic insights by scraping public data from a TikTok profile. This includes inferred interests and engagement metrics beyond what the platform directly provides.
Analyzing audience demographics, interests, and engagement over time is crucial for creators to optimize their content strategy and grow their following on TikTok.
Analyzing TikTok Video Performance
One of the key metrics to analyze on TikTok is your video performance. This includes looking at views, shares, comments, and hashtags. TikTok’s analytics provide data on views, likes, comments, shares, and more for each video (Understanding your analytics | Creator Portal). You can see total numbers as well as trends over time to understand which videos are resonating best with your audience.
Analyzing factors like views and shares can show you which types of videos get the most traction. Reviewing comments gives insight into what viewers like or want more of. Looking at hashtags shows which topics are driving the most engagement. You can also see data on traffic sources to understand where views are coming from.
Third-party analytics tools like Countik (Free TikTok Analytics Tool) provide even more in-depth data on video performance. This includes metrics on video completion rates, viewer drop off points, top performing videos, follower growth, and more. These tools help optimize your video strategy to create more impactful content.
By continuously analyzing TikTok video metrics and performance, creators can better understand their audience. They can see what content resonates and adjust their strategy to maximize engagement and grow their presence.
Monitoring Brand Mentions
TikTok provides a powerful way for brands to monitor mentions of their brand name, products, hashtags or campaigns. There are several tools brands can use to track TikTok conversations:
Exolyt is an all-in-one TikTok analytics tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand across TikTok in real time. You can set up custom alerts and get notifications any time your brand is mentioned. Exolyt provides detailed analytics on the posts, users and hashtags where your brand was mentioned. (Source)
YouScan is another TikTok listening tool that monitors brand name mentions, branded hashtags, product names or any keyword. It tracks TikTok videos, comments, captions and sounds where your search terms are mentioned. YouScan generates reports on mention volume over time and sentiment analysis. (Source)
StoryClash is designed specifically for TikTok monitoring. It tracks mentions across videos, captions, comments and hashtags. StoryClash provides real-time alerts and comprehensive analytics on engagement, demographics and watch time for posts mentioning your brand. (Source)
Conducting TikTok Market Research
TikTok can be a valuable source of market research data. Brands can conduct surveys, focus groups, interviews, and other primary research directly on the platform to gain insights into their target audience.
Some ways to conduct market research on TikTok include:
- Surveys – Create a TikTok survey using a third-party tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform. Share the survey link in your bio or posts and incentivize participation.
- Focus groups – Recruit TikTok users for virtual focus groups to get feedback on products, messaging, concepts, etc. Consider targeting different audience segments.
- Interviews – Identify key influencers or interesting users to interview one-on-one about preferences, habits, interests.
- Contests/challenges – Launch a branded contest or challenge to reveal insights based on user submissions and engagement.
- Polls – Leverage TikTok’s native polling feature to quickly gather data on your audience’s opinions.
- Comments – Analyze comments on your branded posts to identify feedback, concerns, product ideas, etc.
Conducting primary market research enables brands to go directly to the source and gain first-hand insights from the TikTok community. This allows for tailoring content, products, and engagement strategy based on learnings. Approaching market research creatively on TikTok can produce data not found through traditional methods.
Maximizing the Value of TikTok Data
Once you have collected TikTok data, the next step is determining how to apply the insights to improve your marketing and brand presence. Here are some best practices for maximizing the value of your TikTok data:
Integrate TikTok insights with your other marketing platforms – Sync your TikTok analytics with platforms like Facebook Ads Manager or Google Analytics to get a holistic view of your marketing performance. This allows you to easily compare metrics and identify trends across platforms.
Inform your content strategy – Use TikTok’s audience and video analytics to identify the types of content that resonates best with your target audience. Then create more content that aligns with their interests and preferences.
Refine your TikTok ad targeting – Apply learnings about your audience demographics and interests to target your TikTok ads more precisely. This helps improve ad relevance and return on ad spend.
Personalize cross-channel experiences – Segment your audience based on TikTok insights to deliver tailored content across websites, email, social media, and other channels.
Benchmark performance – Use TikTok metrics as KPIs to regularly evaluate the performance of your TikTok marketing efforts. Compare against past performance and industry benchmarks.
Inform business decisions – Let data guide important decisions like where to focus your resources or which new products and features to prioritize.
Continuously optimize – Use A/B testing and experiment with new content formats, captions, sounds, etc. to iterate and improve engagement over time.
