Over the past three years an app has been growing across the world under the radar to older users of Instagram, Facebook and twitter. TikTok, which originally started out life as a music video app has grown to amass a following of other 300 million users since its inception three years ago.

Whether you're a business, brand or an influencer, you can't ignore this applications prevalence, especially for the Gen Z user group, a demographic that is notoriously difficult to break into and market to.

Like any other social media platform, the key to effective marketing and brand awareness is to have an app with a large following and high engagement rates, so what are the best strategies to grow your TikTok account in 2020?

Hashtags

Hashtags are the currency of TikTok, without hashtags your content stands no chance of being discovered by other users. The more hashtags you use, the more visible you will become. It sounds simple in its most basic form, but you need to make sure that you are using the right hashtags for the job.

Any preparation that you put in will increase the visibility of your content, so it is worth the time evaluating and analysing what hashtags are trending. Look at users within your target market and demographic and see what they are using and make sure that you use the same.

You want to use hashtags that are relevant to your subject matter and not just jump on the bandwagon with hashtags that aren't, if you do this you will be overlooked. Assess which hashtags are getting the best responses and highest level of engagement and build your content around that so the link between both is smooth and seamless.

Buying Followers and Likes

If you are starting out on TikTok and want to increase your following quickly, you can purchase followers to bolster your account. Buying followers is a good way to make your account look popular, which creates a snowball effect. The more popular your account looks, the more people will want to follow it and the higher your follower numbers become, but you can't just buy followers on their own.

The key to popularity is engagement with your content, follower numbers may show you as being popular, but if you have 10,000 followers and 12 likes on your content, users will be aware that this is what you have done. You need to legitimise the purchase of followers by also purchasing likes, this is the key to making your content look popular and where many brands and businesses starting out get it wrong.

If it looks as though your content has a high level of engagement, more users are going to want to engage with it and the cycle begins again. You can't purchase followers without purchasing likes, but you can purchase likes without purchasing followers. Just consider how it would look to a user, you need to make sure that your account looks legitimately popular to ensure an organic increase.

Growth Services

It seems that managing social media accounts needs a team of people to effectively run and grow them 24/7 along with a team to create the best content possible for your followers. If you find yourself too busy to really invest the time to organically grow your following, consider TikTok bots and automation. These growth services offer an array of packages that can be tailored to meet your needs.

If you need a dedicated account manager that will handle all of your growth, you can pay for a service like TokUpgrade, but you need to make sure that you know exactly what demographic you are wanting to target, otherwise the effort will be in vain.

Outline ages, locations, interests and the growth service will build an entire strategy for you and engage with this market in your behalf. This engagement can be liking posts, following a set amount of accounts and even commenting. You can also use bots to undertake the same kind of activity, but it will be you who spends the time configuring them and working out what is working and what isn't.

Either way, both of these services give you an organic growth strategy which will increase your following and grow your account, all based on the human trait of wanting validity. The more users you reach out to and like and comment on their content, the more they are willing to do it to you, because you have made them feel good.

Unlike Instagram, there are currently no algorithms set to block this type of activity, but that doesn't mean you want to follow 3400 accounts a day, organic growth is a slower strategy so keep accounts to follow at around 500 per day.

Influencer Marketing

Research is suggestive of the fact that Influencers are going to be bigger and more important on TikTok than they have been on Instagram, which is really saying something. An influencer cans be an amazing inroad to a community or niche that are you struggling to break into.

Find an influencer that matches your brand values, reflects your business and is willing to collaborate with you. You don't want to have this as a one off arrangement, you want to the option to work together on a frequent basis, that way you will become a feature of their followers, which in turn will increase the likely hood of them following you. Influencer marketing is all about collaboration and sharing ideas and content, they provide an excellent way to expand your reach and increase your growth.

Quality Content

You can buy all the followers, work with some of the most popular influencers on the platform, but if your content isn't up to standard, it will all mean nothing. Analyse what type of content is most popular on TikTok and work out how to emulate the high standard. You don't have to be directing short movies every day, but you need to make sure your content remains at the same consistently high standard. You wouldn't upload a poorly edited photo to Instagram, so why would you upload a poorly edited video to TikTok?

Take advantage of software editing applications, from final cut to TikTok in app editing. It really will be worth the time spent as your audience will come to enjoy the high-level content you put out.

Final Considerations

On the surface, TikTok is much like any other social media platform where businesses, brands and influencers are all vying for the attention of the users, but TikTok is a lot more nuanced than previously anticipated, with Gen Z being a difficult user base to market to.

The best way to maximise growth on the app is being prepared. Be prepared with your content, hashtags, target audience and growth service. If you are purchasing followers to grow your account also purchase likes to add to the veneer of popularity so you aren't caught out by the savvy users of this service.

Spend time understanding what your target market want to see and configure your growth strategy around this, if you take all these factors into account you will have no problem growing your TikTok account in 2020.

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