Tiktok is the most downloaded app today and is now a highly influential platform for both businesses and consumers alike.

With over 1.2 billion monthly active users in 2021, as well as being downloaded over 3 billion times since its launch, TikTok has well surpassed the performance of well-established social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, becoming one of the most popular social media platforms of all time.

The increasing usage of TikTok as a marketing platform amongst businesses is further backed by the rampant growth and importance of digital marketing in today’s market.

As digitalisation continues to expand amongst industries, as well as the rampant increase of younger consumers in the market, digital marketing has well overtook face-to-face marketing as the most effective marketing tool for customer engagement.

This can be further seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, as businesses amped up their utilisation of digital marketing so as to increase online sales and steer away from their heavy reliance on face-to-face transactions. You can further read more about the importance of digital marketing here.

As such, by properly optimising your content postings on TikTok, you too can greatly increase your outreach amongst Tiktok’s audience, thus allowing you to effective grow your customer base.

Here are 5 ways on how you as a TikTok content creator, can beat the algorithm and allow your content to spread like wildfire amongst your target audience!

Younger audience are known to prefer shorter, straight-to-the point content that are interesting and easy to digest.

As roughly 50% of TikTok’s audience are under the age of 34, and 41% of Tiktok users are between the age of 16 to 24, it is therefore important that your TikTok videos are direct, fun and easy to understand.

It should be also noted that it is critical to grab your audience’s attention within the first few seconds of your video. If you do not do so, there would be a high chance where your target audience would lose interest in your content and move on to another video.

As such, try to put a interesting hook or opener within the first 3 seconds of your videos, get straight-to-the-point with your content, and ensure your content is fun and interesting.

Creating consistent, quality content that suits your target audience would give you a significantly higher chance of landing your videos into their For-You page. As such, in order for TikTok’s algorithm to properly deliver your content to the intended audience, you will need to know what  type of content your target audience are interested in.

This would mean that you would have to do research on the content preferences and interests of your audience, then implement what you found into your own content to optimise your content offerings for your audience.

By curating TikTok videos that is specifically tailored for your target audience, TikTok would also recognise that your content aims to deliver value for its users, and thus rate your content much higher than others.

You can also bring in traffic in TikTok by using industry-related hashtags. For example, if you are a café in SG, you can use hashtags such as #sgcafe or #hipcafeinsg. This would allow you to properly label your content for the TikTok algorithm to understand, as well as making it easier for your target audience to find your videos.

The audio feature in TikTok provides you with tons of song snippets and audio clips that you can use in your videos to give your content the shine that it needed.

However, with trending audios, you can not only make your TikTok videos more fun and interesting, but you can also influence the TikTok algorithm to favour your videos and put you on your target audience’s For-You page.

You can find trending videos through various means such as:

1. Scrolling through your TikTok’s For-You page. If you see audio being repeatedly used by other content creators, it might mean that the audio is trending. You can check how many times the audio has been used by tapping on the disc on the bottom right of the screen. If the audio clip has only a few amounts of videos made with it, it might mean that have just discovered an emerging trending audio, which could allow you to jump on the trend early and get your content discovered.

2. You can also find trending audio by seeing TikTok’s audio recommendations. Simply tap on the plus button in the middle of your For-You page, click on “Add sound”, and choose the vast amount of trending audio clips that TikTok recommends!

Refering back to point 2, capturing a niche audience would also mean that you would have to find out which part of the day they would be the most active on TikTok.

By figuring out and posting at the peak usage hours of your audience, you would have a better chance in landing your content at their For-You page.

Doing this would also allow you to optimise the performance of your content. This would in turn allow the TikTok algorithm to further boost your content outreach on the platform.

You can figure out your idea posting time by simply switching to a TikTok business account. Just go to “Settings and privacy”, then click on “Manage account” and then “Switch to business account”.

With a business account, you can easily access information about your users, such as their peak usage hours and so on, thus allowing you as a content creator to optimise your content postings.

Longevitiy is the key of the game here. In order for you to be successful in creating contents on TikTok, you would have to ensure that your audience would stick with you in the long term.

Of course, you won’t stick long to your target audience if you do not constantly engage with them.

By switching up your interactivity with your audience, it would induce a sense of connectivity between you and your audience, thus allowing you to drive up your audience retention rate and build a solid following for your brand.

You can ensure connectivity between you and your audience simply by providing them a fun and lasting impression, such as giving smart and quirky replies to their comments.

The crazy thing about the Tik Tok algorithm is that it can only take one or two uploads to become the latest craze overnight.

Since the Tik Tok algorithm continues to revolutionize content exposure, brands are even more eager to identify and capitalize on these Tik Tok trends early for first-mover advantage.

But because social media algorithms are continuously changing and evolving, the only way to beat the Tik Tok algorithm and go viral is to experiment with content and find new ways to promote it.