From the course: Social Media Marketing Trends

Navigating the next TikTok era

From the course: Social Media Marketing Trends

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Navigating the next TikTok era

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- [Narrator] TikTok was officially banned in the US, but quickly returned after a short hiatus, leaving the platform's status in a state of limbo. It's not important to follow every update about the app's continued ownership journey and how the US government plans to address this moving forward. What you should be mindful of as a marketer is adapting your strategy to benefit from the use of distinctive facets of TikTok, and at the same time, limiting your reliance on the app. Here's what your brand should start and stop doing on TikTok. First off, use TikTok to narrow in on a focus subject given the algorithm is better suited to matching your content based on someone's interests if your videos follow a central theme. Sure, it's always a good idea to have a key set of topics your brand is known for covering on social media, but when it comes to TikTok, get more streamlined in order to gain visibility. Plus, covering a topic consistently builds familiarity with your brand's point of view and identity compared to all the new content and voices users are exposed to in their feed. Save the more nuanced exploration of a broader range of subject matter to your activities on other social networks. Prioritize TikTok as a destination for quick engaging content that follows a unified concept like Ryan Air's budget travel humor or Sarah V's skincare education on the platform. Another facet of TikTok to further embrace is participating in trends to bring yourself into relevant conversations and earned visibility based on your brand's perspective. Don't only react to trends as that's the quickest way to blend in with every other brand, but instead react to the occasional trend when it's relevant and there's a tie in with your focus. Next, there's luckily a wider range of diverse creators active on TikTok that you're less likely to find elsewhere, so partnering with them can allow you to tap into a much larger audience, whether working with creators from a greater variety of industries, geographic regions, lived experiences and interests, it's a one of a kind opportunity to expand your reach and impact. To summarize, start focusing your publishing efforts on TikTok around a more central theme. Participate in trends when relevant and collaborate with a distinct set of creators there. Now, switching gears, it's important to stop over investing in TikTok despite its popularity and influence on the greater social media ecosystem. Rather, it's necessary to vary your investments on social media and your marketing in general to reduce the impact of TikTok potentially disappearing for good. Similar to the concept of diversifying your investments in a mutual fund, spread your activities across platforms so your marketing is more resilient and you're offsetting possible risks. Next, it's important to stop using TikTok as the sole destination for sharing short-form video. Yes, the social platform really did popularize short-form video to the mainstream, but it is a wise choice to share some of these shorter videos to other platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Often, it's in the best interest of most businesses to republish these videos verbatim across networks. Occasionally with some quick contextual change s to the copy and editing. We've all been told it's a best practice to create unique content for every destination, advice I've shared before too, but it's better today to distribute this content in multiple places. That's because repurposing in this manner will help extend your resources, allowing you to test what messaging works per channel and potentially earn greater visibility for your videos. Beyond making slight adjustments like altering the video's dimensions or details in the caption, post this content at different times and dates so you're varying the posting schedule. Lastly, don't limit your partnerships with TikTok creators to TikTok as the rewards you reap from these collaborations could vanish if the app goes away or activity there stagnates. To protect your influencer spending, invest in campaigns where you're sponsoring the creator's content on TikTok and at least one other channel at the same time. It is more costly to include additional formats and channels involved in an initiative, but worth further ensuring these investments have more longevity, impact and reach. That's a wrap. Those are some of the actions your organization should adopt and avoid as TikTok's future remains uncertain.

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