TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platforms, with over 1 billion monthly active users. For brands and creators, growing a TikTok account is important to reach new audiences, increase brand awareness, and drive engagement.
Having an engaged following on TikTok can lead to increased visibility, traffic, and even sales. But growing an account requires consistency, quality content, and effective optimization. With the right strategy, any brand or creator can build a thriving audience and presence on TikTok.
This guide will provide tips to grow your TikTok account, from optimizing your profile to leveraging trends and analyzing performance. With dedicated effort, you can gain more followers, views, and engagement on TikTok.
Determine Your Niche
Establishing a clear niche and content focus is crucial for growth and engagement on TikTok. With over 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok has become an incredibly competitive platform. To stand out, you need to identify and cater to a specific target audience interested in your niche rather than taking a broad, general approach. Some of the most popular and effective niches on TikTok include:
- Dance – All styles of dance from hip hop to ballet have huge audiences on TikTok. Play to your strengths and film dance videos showcasing your skills.
- Comedy/Humor – Funny videos consistently go viral on TikTok. Come up with amusing sketches, jokes, or situational comedy bits.
- Food – From recipes to restaurant reviews, food is hugely popular on TikTok. Feature your cooking skills or favorite eateries.
- DIY/Crafts – Instructional videos teaching crafts or home projects get a lot of engagement. Showcase your creativity.
The key is to identify a niche you are knowledgeable and passionate about. This will come through in your content and help you build a loyal following. Do keyword research to analyze niches and ensure there is demand for videos within your chosen topics. Establishing your niche focus from the start will help direct your content strategy.
Optimize Your Profile
Optimizing your TikTok profile is crucial for growing your account and engaging your target audience. Your profile serves as your homepage on TikTok where viewers get a first impression of your brand. Consistency with your niche in all profile elements helps establish your expertise and content focus.
Your profile photo should reflect your niche and brand identity. Use a high-quality, well-lit headshot or logo for recognition. The bio allows up to 80 characters for a short, compelling description of your account’s purpose. Include relevant keywords like your niche, location, or topics. Add links to your website, Instagram, YouTube, etc. to drive traffic to other platforms. The username should also align with your niche for discoverability.
Customizing your profile adds personality and helps viewers relate to you. The “About” section can share your niche, mission, expertise, etc. in 160 characters. Use the “Link in Bio” feature to highlight content. Frequently update the links to promote new videos.
Consistent optimization of your profile allows viewers to instantly understand your niche, building familiarity and trust in your brand. This drives profile visits, followers, engagement, and overall growth on TikTok.
Post Quality Content Consistently
To grow your TikTok account, it’s important to post quality content on a consistent basis. Experts recommend posting 1-3 times per day to keep your audience engaged and increase your discoverability on the platform [1]. Make sure to use relevant hashtags and viral sounds to make it easier for new users to find your content. Consider creating content in different formats like dance videos, comedy skits, tutorials, reactions, and storytimes to appeal to a wider audience.
Short-form video works very well on TikTok, so keep your videos under 60 seconds if possible. Use text overlay, effects, filters, and stickers to enhance your videos. Pay attention to trends and challenges – creating content tied to popular hashtags can help expose your profile. But also focus on your niche and create evergreen content that aligns with your brand and personality.
Engage With Your Audience
Engaging with your audience is crucial for growing a loyal following on TikTok. Liking, commenting on, duetting, and stitching other users’ videos shows them you care about their content. It also exposes your profile to their followers. You should aim to engage with your audience daily by responding to comments and participating in trends.
Responding to comments shows followers you value them. Even just liking comments demonstrates you read them. Replying builds relationships with viewers and gives them incentives to keep watching and engaging with you. Set aside time every day to reply to comments.
Duetting and stitching let you put your own spin on trends while exposing yourself to new audiences. Don’t just watch videos – engage! Duetting is an easy way to join trending challenges. The original creator will also be notified, potentially exposing your content to their followers.
The more you interact, the more TikTok sees you as an engaged user. This signals to the algorithm to show your content to more people. According to research by Antione Turner, engagement directly impacts your reach and content effectiveness on TikTok. So regularly engaging should be a priority.
Collaborate With Others
Discuss collaborating with relevant creators in your niche to cross-promote. Give examples of potential collaborations.
Collaborating with other creators on TikTok can be a highly effective growth strategy. Look for creators in your niche with engaged followings and propose doing a collab video or cross-promotion. This gets your content in front of their existing audience while also exposing you to new potential followers. According to TikTok, brand collaborations with creators drive great results, with the top creators delivering over 2x the lift in ad recall.
Some examples of potential collaborations include:
- Doing a co-created video based on a trend
- Having another creator make a video reviewing or reacting to your content
- Shoutouts where you promote each other’s profiles
- Giveaways or contests for both audiences
- Live streams together
Identify creators relevant to your niche and brand with good engagement and production quality. Reach out respectfully with a specific collab proposal that benefits both parties. Compensate them fairly for their time and access to their audience. Executed strategically, TikTok collaborations can significantly boost your growth.
Use Trends and Challenges
One of the best ways to get your content seen on TikTok is by joining popular hashtags or participating in trending challenges. Hashtags on TikTok make it easy to connect your content with others posting about the same topics. Look up trending hashtags related to your niche and include the most relevant ones in your captions and descriptions. This increases the chance of your videos showing up for users interested in those topics. According to TikTok, trends gain power as more users participate by commenting or creating their own videos (source).
Similarly, taking part in viral challenges is an effective tactic for getting more views. Challenges invite users to create videos performing a specific task, like dancing to a popular song. Look at the “Discover” page to find trending challenges that could work for your brand. Then create fun, creative videos aligned with the challenge format. Some of the most successful brand campaigns have leveraged viral challenges, as they provide a built-in audience of users looking for that hashtag (source). It shows you understand the platform and engage with the community.
In summary, make use of trends and challenges on TikTok to expand your reach. Tap into viral hashtags and challenges already gaining traction to get your content seen by more users who are actively participating in those topics.
Advertise Outside TikTok
Promoting your TikTok account on other platforms is a great way to drive more followers. Here are some tips for advertising outside of TikTok:
Post snippets or previews of your best TikTok videos on other social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Make sure to include a strong call-to-action for people to check out your TikTok profile. You can also run paid ads on these platforms targeting potential new followers.
Leverage your YouTube channel and videos to promote your TikTok account. Mention your TikTok handle, show TikTok videos, and encourage viewers to follow you on TikTok.
Collaborate with influencers in your niche and cross-promote content. This expands your reach to new audiences organically.
Run Google or social media ads directing to your TikTok profile or best videos. Tailor your targeting to find likely new followers.
Promote your account on forums, groups, and communities related to your niche. Engage regularly while sharing your TikTok handle.
Consider sponsorships and brand partnerships that allow you to advertise your TikTok account to new demographics.
Use link building and SEO best practices to rank your TikTok account for related keywords and queries.
In summary, leveraging other platforms both organically and through paid promotion is a smart growth strategy for your TikTok account.
Analyze Performance
One of the best ways to grow your TikTok account is to analyze your performance data and optimize based on those insights. TikTok has a built-in analytics section that provides valuable metrics on your videos.
As noted in TikTok’s Creator Portal, you can access analytics by going to your profile, tapping the three dots, selecting “Creator Tools”, and then choosing “Analytics” (Source). The key metrics to examine are views, likes, comments, shares, followers gained, and more. You can break this data down by specific videos to see which perform best.
Third-party analytics tools like Countik also let you analyze the recent posts of any TikTok account for free. Simply enter the handle to get data on views, likes, comments, and more (Source). This allows you to benchmark against competitors.
By regularly checking TikTok analytics, you can identify your top-performing videos and types of content. Lean into what’s working and refine what’s not based on the hard data. This will optimize your strategy and help grow your TikTok presence.
Conclusion
Growing a successful TikTok account requires consistency, engagement with your audience, and optimizing content around trending sounds and challenges. The key strategies covered in this article include determining your niche, optimizing your profile, posting quality content regularly, interacting with your followers, collaborating with other creators, capitalizing on viral trends, advertising outside of TikTok, and analyzing your performance metrics. While growth takes time and effort, by sticking to these best practices, you can gradually build an audience and increase your views and followers. The most important thing is to stay patient and committed to creating content tailored to TikTok’s platform. With the right strategy and execution, you can leverage TikTok to grow an authentic and engaged community around your brand.
