Strong public relations have always been an important aspect of businesses in the modern world. As time has progressed, so has the need for keeping your company in good credit with the public as they often have much more respect for companies with an openly positive ethos and morals. When you have earned this level of respect, you can garner a higher percentage of them as customers. 

Today, PR has developed exponentially, with the digital world sitting front and centre as the primary medium for its delivery. Yet, the digital world encompasses more and more new iterations of social media platforms and technologies to help deliver content to the masses. The most recent to have gained the attention of marketers and PR companies is known as Tik Tok, developed by the Chinese company ByteDance. 

What Is Tik Tok?

Seen by some as a sort of spiritual successor to the now non-existent video-based app Vine, Tik Tok is a social media platform whereby users can record videos directly from their app, or upload and edit videos that have previously been recorded via other methods, and then share those videos with the public. Users then scroll through, and an algorithm will dictate what types of videos will interest them as it builds a profile based on the videos they’ve previously viewed. As of 2021, Tik Tok has 689 million active users. Remember, that’s not just accounts that have been created; that is the number of people regularly browsing and uploading content to the platform. This, along with the staggering figure from the same source that more than 1 billion videos were viewed per day in the past year, makes it understandable that PR companies have begun to consider Tik Tok as a viable platform.

How Do Businesses Use Tik Tok?

There are many ways that companies incorporate Tik Tok into their business plan, just like other social media platforms. The most common is generic, straightforward advertising. The algorithm can be influenced by advertisers using Tik Tok’s business suite, paying for advertising slots similar to how you’d do on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Tik Tok allows you to set a budget for your advert and your intended goals for reach and engagement, and you can even choose what your audience would be. Remember that each advertisement video will clearly notify users that it’s an advert. While this transparency is ethical, it also causes many to skip past the advert. Many digital PR agencies are now also helping businesses to earn attention on sites like TikTok by creating unique and enticing video content. 

What Are The Benefits Of Using Tik Tok For Marketing?

Ultimately, the main reason businesses should be using platforms like Tik Tok is purely for the number of people they can reach with well thought out and creative content. Directing your advertising to the right demographics can significantly increase your customer base, even from audiences you would never have expected to get a hold of. Experts within PR roles understand the importance of directed, localised marketing, but they also know that expanding to other audiences and relevant demographics can be just as important. 

What Are The Benefits Of PR?

When it comes to the PR side of things, showing the public that you remain relevant by using these new platforms and producing amazing, exciting or entertaining content is hugely beneficial. This offers more of a human side to your company when done correctly and can draw people in much more easily than a static website ad, as users will actively scroll onto your video, increasing the amount of attention they have to put into your ad. You can also easily add a call to action and links to your website, changing a number of those impressions into actual conversions. 

Why Flexibility And Adaptability Is Essential In PR

For PR and marketing teams, it’s essential to continue to adapt and make use of quality advice and tips offered by relevant resources such as PR blogs. As with any industry, it’s easy to become set in your ways as to how you do things, and operations can become stale and irrelevant to society. By not seeing the new possibilities arising after shifts in society occur, you and your business will likely get left behind by competitors. Instead of allowing this to happen, you need to ensure that you and your team constantly strive to innovate and adapt to the contemporary world. If you’re still producing your content solely for Facebook accounts, for example, but your target demographic is younger people between 18 and 25, then failing to use the mediums that they frequent, such as TikTok, can mean that a considerable percentage of your potential audience is not being reached.

How To Use Tik Tok For Your Brand

You could do many different things when making content for your Tik Tok account. Editing content before uploading to the platform is highly advised, as you’ll be able to add engaging graphical elements like your own music and text and generally create something that looks much more professional. Working with a professional content creation team is ideal here, whether in-house or outsourced, as it’s vital to have someone constantly searching for new, time-sensitive trends to maximise the impact of your content. As with other forms of social media, interacting with your audience is a crucial element to using platforms like Tik Tok. Make sure that whatever you create speaks to them in some way and provides some form of interaction. Reply to comments and even consider creating videos in response to popular comments from your audience.

Things To Consider When Creating Your Content

It entirely depends on the message you want to convey to your audience, but Tik Tok content tends to be light-hearted and to the point. These days, attention spans are astronomically low and continue to worsen as the years go by and more content appears. Our smartphones dominate our attention, as media consumption on these devices far outweighs any other. As well as this, the amount of stuff we have available to view online, which increases exponentially, the more impatient many of us become. Many of us struggle to contain ourselves before moving on to watch the next bit of content. So ultimately, your content must grab the viewers’ attention quickly, just as any other social media content should. As well as this, your videos should ideally be relevant and topical to the current themes and trends in society. There’s no point trying to jump on the bandwagon of a particular viral trend weeks after it’s been done to death. You’ll just be proving that you just don’t have your finger on the pulse. 

Does Your Audience Use Tik Tok?

It’s always worthwhile trying to bring in new demographics for your business to grow your brand and ultimately help you find further success. However, for a more niche business, there’s not much point in spending time and money on developing high-quality video content that’s just not going to be viewed by anyone. Luckily, due to the app’s popularity, Tik Tok encompasses a hugely diverse demographic, appealing to many different age groups, genders, and cultures, which is a relatively low risk. This, combined with the fact that Tik Tok possesses some very advanced analytics and algorithms to help you to direct your content to the right people, even if it is the smallest demographic on the app. Either way, you must be sure that at least a portion of your target audience uses the app itself.