Using TikTok for business: effortless communication at your fingertips

30 seconds - in that time our blood travels 7 kilometres, our heart beats 36 times, and we produce 72 million red blood cells. While our body performs dozens of vital tasks in half a minute, it takes the same amount of time to make a TikTok video of ideal length. Why is TikTok becoming an essential part of young people's daily lives and what should brands do about it? Let's get to know the TikTok story and its potential!

What is TikTok?

TikTok is a social media platform for video sharing, an app that can be downloaded from the Google Play store and the App Store. Getting started is easy: just create an account with an email address and you'll be flooded with short, punchy videos.

Using TikTok

At the heart of the app is the video feed, where audiovisual content created by other users is displayed. Once registered, a large number and variety of videos appear here, due to the algorithm showing freshly uploaded content first, and as you start liking and following the creators, the feed is shaped according to your interests.

It's essential to know that each user has a TikCode, which makes it easy to find them in the crowd, by simply scanning the code with your phone. This can be particularly important for brands who want to promote their TikTok channel on other channels.

TikTok is essentially a fun social media, although you can also find more serious content by scrolling through the video feed. The content includes live videos, which can be viewed if you have more than 1000 followers.

How TikTok works

Using TikTok is not just about consuming content, but also about producing content. When you're making a video, you can use a variety of extra effects to make it more interesting, eye-catching, and vibrant, different filters, speed controls, an AR filter to hide blemishes, a timer, and flash. Importantly, you can add sound to your video, as well as music and stickers.

As a social media, TikTok truly strives to build community. For example, if we see a video we want to respond to, we can do so with a duet video. In addition to duets, we can also join challenges, which are typically started by a person or an organisation with a specific purpose, and the idea is to create a video with a specific structure and content. 

Influencers play a big role on the platform, gathering a community around them and creating fun, informative content for them. In many cases, they work with brands and companies to promote their products and services. This makes them an excellent marketing tool even if the brand does not have a TikTok account, as they can reach a new audience. And if you do, you can even run ads for more precise targeting.

The sweeping TikTok trend

The whirlwind of social media is sucking people in. The TikTok hurricane started in China in 2017, courtesy of ByteDance. Its predecessor, Douyint, debuted on the domestic market in 2016 and went international in 2017 under the name TikTok. 

The platform is now present in more than 160 countries and boasts more than 1.1 billion users. With more than 1 billion monthly users, TikTok tops giants such as Facebook (2.9 billion), YouTube (2.2 billion), and Instagram (1.4 billion), but leaves Snapchat (750 million), Pinterest (480 million), and X (former twitter) (300 million) behind.

The user base is mostly young people: more than 38% are aged 18-24 and 32.5% are aged 25-34. This means that almost three-quarters of users are under 34. It is therefore the perfect platform for brands to reach young adults.

Using TikTok for business? Yes!

Even today, many brands still think of TikTok as a "children's playground", a frivolous platform where no meaningful marketing results can be achieved. 

But the numbers and experience prove this wrong: the channel is even more engaging than Facebook and Instagram. With an engagement rate of 5.69%, it beats all other social media platforms. 

TikTok is a platform where you can quickly build a brand and a community. It's no wonder, as users spend an average of 22.9 hours on the app, just slightly less than the chart-topping YouTube (23.4 hours).

In terms of advertising, TikTok produces staggering numbers: potential ad impressions are 945 million. It's no wonder that ad spending in 2022 is up 29% on the previous quarter. The statistics also show that collaboration between brands and content producers can increase a brand's popularity by 26%.

When it comes to brand building and community building, and targeting a younger demographic, TikTok is the new shining star in the online marketing sky that could lead to a consume-rich Hanaanaos.

If you do it right, it works!

International trends confirm the potential of TikTok. Hyundai, for example, first used the TikTok weapon at the launch of the IONIQ 6 to communicate the benefits of the car to the platform's target audience. Their strategy resulted in a 13% increase in brand recall, a 3.5% increase in brand awareness and a 2.5% increase in brand familiarity.

Success stories include Maybelline, who wanted to increase brand awareness of a product and strung it onto a Valentine's Day campaign. They achieved over 55 million impressions in a single day, with an increase of 208% in average daily sales.

A case in point is Netflix, which boasted a huge following of 13.5 million from the start. From an advertising perspective, the campaign to launch the third season of Cobra Kai was memorable. It reached 2.8 million views and the hashtag #cobrakaicho generated 5.6 billion views.

The Meraki and the TikTok 

Meraki Marketing created the TikTok branch within its social media division in 2023. A team of well-known, young TikTokers has been assembled to pave the way for TikTok communications for the agency's clients. 

Bringing in external resources was necessary because Meraki realised that this was a blind spot, an area in which it lacked experience and that if it wanted to achieve results, it would need professional tiktokkers. And the results did come: hundreds of thousands of video views, thousands of likes, tons of followers, and satisfied customers.

Working with clients is efficient: first, a content plan, a detailed script, is drawn up and then implemented after approval. Experience has shown that humorous and useful "tips and tricks" content can make a difference on the channels.

When producing content, it mustn't be just l'art puor l'art! While the content is light-hearted, the analysis and preparation behind it is serious. TikTok trends data shows what topics, music, and hashtags are popular, which can be used to favour the algorithm responsible for content distribution. Since trends are constantly changing, content production is also done week by week, always incorporating what's new.

Speed, humour, usefulness, and accuracy - these are what it takes to make a TikTok channel go boom! And of course, the brand must dare to step outside the box. Courage, no risk, no gain!

The future of TikTok looks bright, with more and more people signing up and more and more people wanting to build a community on this platform. How long this video heaven will last is anyone's guess, but it will be a part of our daily lives for many years to come.