TikTok Business, How to Use the App Correctly for Your Company

1. What is TikTok?
2. Why can TikTok be beneficial for businesses?
3. What advantages does a TikTok Business account offer?
4. How do you create a TikTok business profile?
5. How to use TikTok Business properly
6. Possible types of content for your company
7. Recommended tools for handling TikTok Business
8. Conclusion to TikTok-for-Business

"TikTok? Isn't that the platform for dancing teenagers?"
This is more or less how the customers of our guest author Lukas Heining reacted when he approached them in 2019 with his company Pro & Me to join the short video platform. Provided, of course, they had ever heard of it.

Three years later we have published more than 4,000 videos with Pro & Me, have started 12 of our own accounts, set up 39 customer accounts, managed 84 campaigns. Our international account has 1.4 million followers, the German-speaking one approx. 750,000.

10 people are working day in day out to develop strategies, think about concepts, script videos, produce and publish them. Community management, influencer selection and ad campaigns. The possibilities seem endless.

TikTok has gone from being a niche app for dance videos to marketing superstar. In Germany, the app has almost 21 million active users, the vast majority of whom are 18-35 years old and spend more than an hour using the app every day.

Viral TikTok videos determine the songs that are played on the radio, what products are sold out in the supermarket and which online shops are brought to their knees by too much traffic.

TikTok is impossible to imagine from the myriad of marketing channels, and is currently probably the most relevant platform for the majority of users, creators and brands.

But how can you as a company use a short video app for your benefit?
How do you manage to set up an account? What content do you post? What tools do you need and above all: is it all worth it at all?

What is TikTok?

First and foremost, it needs to be clarified what TikTok is actually. Because it is not, as many would suspect, a social media platform.

The content is not played out based on your social contacts, but primarily based on your interests. So we're not talking about a "social" feed, but an "interest-based" feed.

This feed is called the "For You Page" and forms the heart of the app. The average users consume the majority of the content here.

This consists of short, informative, entertaining or emotional videos. These are usually in 16:9 format, so they are in portrait format and fill the entire smartphone screen.

They also run in a loop, meaning the video simply restarts at the end and keeps running until you scroll past it and the next video is displayed.

This combination of concise, snappy video content combined with infinity scrolling and a very sophisticated algorithm makes TikTok incredibly addictive. No other app manages to keep its users on the platform as long as TikTok.

In our Pro & Me team, we also easily spend over four hours a day using it. This is one of the reasons why TikTok is also very relevant for companies. Because at the end of the day, marketing is always about picking up your own target group where they prefer to spend their time.

Why can TikTok be beneficial for businesses?

Now that we have clarified what TikTok is, the question arises why it is so important as a platform for businesses.

The simple answer is: because it is important for your customers.

Of course, you have to distinguish between B2B and B2C, consumer goods or services, e-commerce or retail.
However, TikTok is exciting for every company in principle.

Reasons for this are the functionality of the algorithm, the low advertising costs, high interaction from users and the relatively low barrier to entry.

We have already briefly explained the former in the previous section.
By playing out TikTok contents based on interest, you can reach millions of viewers immediately with a good and relevant video – even if you have not yet got a single follower.

This is hardly possible on other platforms and results in a very high, organic range. If you approach this correctly, you can achieve a large reach here without having to spend any advertising budget at all.

Since TikTok is only gradually coming to the agenda of many companies, the total ad spend, i.e. the amount of advertising expenditure, is still comparatively low.

Number of monthly active Instagram users via Android in Germany from January 2017 to January 2022

This is due to the fact that soon almost as many users as Instagram, for example, use the platform in this country, you can reach just as many contacts, but have to compete against less competition. This results in lower advertising costs, even if these have already increased sharply in the last 12 months.

This is also likely to be the same reason for the high interaction rates around the content graph.
Many users and comparatively few active creators create a higher demand for good content. These then receive correspondingly many interactions.

Producing videos is a thing of its own. In relation to nice pictures and botched graphics, it is significantly more demanding.
And yet the barrier to entry on TikTok for a video platform is relatively low. Because you don't need expensive camera technology, microphones, lights, video editing programs and high-end computers.

Only a current smartphone model and the TikTok app. All features for recording, editing, adding music, effects, animations etc. are already integrated in the app and videos can therefore be posted directly from there.

There are of course also some useful tools outside the app that we will come to later. But in principle, it is possible to represent pure content production within TikTok.

What advantages does a TikTok Business account offer?

The TikTok for Business account offers some advantages over a regular user account. However, there are also disadvantages that only apply to business accounts. We'll return to this later.

The decisive advantage of a business account is the possibility to link the TikTok account with the Business Center and use the TikTok AdCenter to play out advertisements on your own account.

There are two ways to do this: playing out existing videos that have been posted on the account, or playing out videos that are not supposed to be displayed on the account. The latter is also called "Dark Advertising", because the ads are not visible on the account, but are only viewed by users when they are played out.

If you decide to promote videos on your own account, it often makes sense to distribute the budget in such a way that organically well-functioning videos are played out more strongly. If something works well organically, it will usually also perform above average in paid advertising.

Another advantage of a business account is access to analysis data.
In the TikTok account you can access these in the settings and therefore evaluate your activities. How quickly is the account gaining new followers? How much reach is being generated? Which videos are performing particularly well?

All these metrics and much more can be seen in the analysis.
What is particularly exciting is the analysis of individual videos. This can be accessed through the menu at the video level and provides detailed insights such as total playing time, average playing time per user, number of likes, shares and saves.

How do you create a TikTok business profile?

Creating a business profile on TikTok is initially quite easy.
In the app, a "TikTok Pro Account for Business" can be created from the normal profile, and that's with two easy clicks in the settings.

From the time of the conversion, it takes a few more days until all analysis data can be viewed.

You can easily create the advertising account at getstarted.tiktok.com. You just have to fill out and submit a short form with data. Normally, you will receive a confirmation within a few minutes and can log in via the Business Center.

How to use TikTok Business properly

In order to fully exploit the potential of TikTok, you should play the platform accordingly to your own possibilities.

It is important to adapt to the platform and its target group. Existing videos from Instagram, Facebook or other channels usually show below-average performance on TikTok.

To get a feel for the content, it is advisable to scroll through the platform for some time and assess the content.

A brief research of your own competitors is also useful. Are these active on TikTok? What type of content is published? Does this meet with a positive response and reach? What could you do differently yourself to set yourself apart?

Next, you should collect ideas on how you could generally use the platform. Should only organic videos be posted? Should these also be advertised? Or would a collaboration with influencers be appropriate?

The latter could be the case if a company is already successfully working with influencers on Instagram and the same people are also represented on TikTok.

Or if you don't quite understand how to showcase your product on TikTok. In this case, it can also be helpful to use the creative services of content creators.

How exactly you play the platform of course depends on many factors such as internal resources, budget, goal of activities, experience etc.

Possible types of content for your company

There are very different ways to play TikTok as a company.

For Mein Deal we produce informative content with Pro & Me that addresses the interests of the target group. This type of content is called edutainment, because it is a mixture of educational and entertaining content. Usually a protagonist stands in front of the camera and speaks directly to the viewers.

Fun formats also have their raison d'être. with funny, self-deprecating videos we manage to reach and excite the target group on the TikTok account of Gerolsteiner,. By using the eye filter, for example, content can be created without the presenter being completely visible.

Interactive show concepts, like at OWWN or our in-house format Frontpage TV, are particularly well suited to produce a large amount of content in a relatively compact way. On dedicated shooting days, content for a whole month or even several months can be produced within a few hours.

In addition, there are hundreds more ideas and types of content. But also the collaboration with influencers can be very successful.

Or the active community management, where reaching out to your brand can be generated by writing comments.

Recommended tools for handling TikTok Business

Luckily, there are now some tools that make the work on TikTok easier.

Recorded videos can be cut and edited with well-known video software like Adobe Premiere Pro or for Apple users also Final Cut Pro. These programs allow you to create appealing videos and edit images, colours, tones and much more.

If you prefer to cut your TikTok videos on your smartphone, you are well served with Cap Cut or the TikTok own TikTok Studio. Both apps are very intuitive and easier to use than Premiere Pro or Final Cut, but do not give quite as many options.

For planning and implementation of influencer marketing measures, influData, a platform that enables detailed search and analysis of over 20 million influencers and their audience, is suitable for example.
We use this to select influencers, determine market value and track activities.

In the web interface of TikTok, videos can be planned and posted up to ten days in advance from the desktop. But also with the popular Social Media Suitesplanning app Hootsuite, you can plan postings, evaluate data and answer comments.

Conclusion to TikTok-for-Business

TikTok has grown from a niche platform to one of the most relevant marketing channels for businesses in the last three years.

The opportunities TikTok offers are far from being exploited in all sectors and by all companies, so there is still a lot of potential. The forecasts show that the future will increasingly rely on short-form vertical videos.

Good, creative content, thoughtful performance campaigns, authentic influencer placements and intensive community management can ensure success on the platform.