TikTok For Business (+ END OF INSTAGRAM!?)
So I'm going to go through the app for the very first time with you in today's video and I hope by the end of it, you and me - entrepreneurs - will have a better idea of whether Tiktok is worth our time or not. Maybe you've heard of Tiktok already, maybe your teenager's on it, or your niece or your nephew. But whenever these new fandangled apps come out that the teens are all over, us older folks or elder millennials as I like to call myself, oftentimes ignore it. We think right away "the kids, the kids, that's for the kids. It's not for me.
I'm a serious business person. That's just a waste of time." I have thought that myself, I mean Tiktok's actually been on the market for three years. It originally came out as Musical.ly and I think I downloaded it but never did anything with it because I thought the same thing like eh, waste of time. Let's have, let's let the kids have their fun, you know, but here we are in 2019 and I am diving into Tiktok. Let's cover exactly what Tiktok is and then let's explore the app together.
So what's Tiktok? Well, imagine if Snapchat, Spotify, Vine and Twitch, had a baby. Their baby would be Tiktok. Now if it sounded like I just said Spanglish to you and you're like, what are all those things? Basically what Tiktok is is an app for iOS and Android. It's a way for you to share lip sync, comedy and talent videos. Don't run away just yet because from what I've seen of Tiktok already, you don't necessarily need to be Jennifer Lopez to be posting these videos and entertaining the masses. So the other thing to take note here is in 2019 Tiktok is the fastest growing app. We're talking already 500 million active users. To put that into context, Instagram has over a billion. So at this stage, Tiktok already has half the amount of users that Instagram has. So that's a lot of people who are spending time in that app. So why should we, serious business people, care about Tiktok? Well, based on my initial research, here's what I've found. The app is basically the wild, wild west of social media. So think back to Instagram back in 2011, 2012, when we all wished went all in on Instagram.
That's today. That's right. Now when it comes to Tiktok, the other cool thing about it is you can really be known for your niche really quickly. There's already a ton of niches on the app in the makeup world, travel, art, fitness, so now would be the time to get established in your niche. The trick will be to figure out how your niche works on Tiktok. You can only upload 15 second recordings or you can stitch together multiple recordings for 60 seconds, but this isn't the app to bore people with your trainings.
You're going to want to blend entertainment with your information. One of the coolest things about Tiktok is the potential for a large audience transfer. What does that mean? Basically, you can grow an audience on Tiktok really fast and then connect them over to your other social media platforms like Instagram or YouTube. Back in the day, other social media networks used to be really good for that, but now they're all pretty popular and pretty saturated but not Tiktok. Let's talk business potential of Tiktok.
As I just mentioned, there's this share-ability factor within the app, so connecting to your other social networks or creating a video in the app and then being able to save it to your phone, save it as a GIF, share it to your Instagram stories. You can easily mix and match platforms starting with Tiktok. It's also a low pressure environment, so if you feel like sharing on your Instagram stories or in your feed is giving you anxiety, like, "I have to be perfect", Tiktok is the place to practice. Just think in terms of, well, no one's really following me here and no one's really watching and caring, so that's one way to get used to being visible and showing up more in your business. The other cool thing I'm seeing about Tiktok is it's really not a perfect and pretty competition as we sometimes see on Instagram.
Tiktok is not about showing "your best self" and "your best life". It's all about being real and showing the world who you are. Maybe that means you're not the fittest person in the world or not the most productive person in the world, but you can still show up, dance a little, have a good time, and entertain your followers. Plus we've got some new features that have just hit Tiktok including the ability to run ads. Yay. I love paid advertising. And the ability to go live. So yes, we already have these features with Facebook and Instagram, but obviously Tiktok is growing so fast because they've already brought them over to their platform too. So I have Tiktok downloaded on my phone already. It's in the depths of my social media apps, but I found it.
So let's go into the Tiktok app together right now. Nope. No. Okay. Definitely young. Definitely young demographic right away. Looks like I'm signed in already. Oh my God. What did I hit? Okay, um... 1.7 million hearts, that video. Let's go to the Discover tab. "Dorm life" is a trending hashtag. "Joke is on you" is a trending hashtag. I actually like that they have hashtags. I mean, this is already one great way to get your niche going. Let's look at me for a second. Oh, I need a Tiktok account to continue. Here we go.
All right, so here's where I actually sign up. [French accent] Two very boring minutes later... All right, so my beautiful user account is here. User 3831693513447. Amazing, zero followers. But the app is prompting me to create your first short video. Let's do that. Allow access to everything. You can have me Tiktok. Okay, so there's Effie. I will flip to film this way. Okay, let's be cool and not talk in these videos. And then, then let's add some sounds. Electronic. I do like electronic. [music] [upbeat electronic music] Okay let's see what we can do with the effects. Gold powder. [electronic music] Ooh that's fun. That looks like we're raving. All right, well I mean, I'm happy with that. Oh, hold to apply effects and then you can probably like switch. Oh fun. [electronic music] We're definitely raving now.
Okay, so that was super easy to apply effects. I mean, I haven't even gone into all of this stuff too - transitions, splits. Okay. Well I'm happy with our rave. Yeah, I'm really happy with that. See what the stickers are doing. Poll? Ooh, okay. So there's some Instagram Story options. You're going to love editing this. Let's say productive work day? Tongue in cheek. We're having a really good time in this video. There's some other options here. I see filter, trim, volume, but I'm kind of happy with this. Let's try it. Let's hit 'Next'. Okay, so this looks really familiar. This looks like I'm posting to Instagram, so wow.
And we have an option to add a Wikipedia link. Interesting. Let's leave the, okay, I'm good. I'm going to leave all the default settings on. We need to describe the video. I don't know why I feel so old, just trying to write a caption. "Filming YouTube videos for business". You know? Like that's pretty lame. Hashtag business, Oh see, dorm life is really trending. They're really pushing dorm life, which tells you a little something about the demographic. But we are early adopters here. We are trailblazers. So let's look through our business hashtags. #business has 62.5 million views. Hell yes. Let's see what other hashtags we can do. Find related to business. Okay, so I have totally pimped out my caption with hashtags. Probably could do more, but I think, I think we've covered that. Oh, let's select our cover. Yeah, that looks good. Okay, well let's just post it and then maybe I can save it after your account is public and your public videos will be visible to everyone.
Perfect. There we go. First, Tiktok video is up. So I guess we'll just let the app do its thing. Now let's see if I can find some other, um, entrepreneurs. Like if we go to #business right now, let's see. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of hashtags we can follow. Let's see. Can I follow this? Add to favorites. Perfect. Let's see your favorite items. There we go. Let's take a look. So let's heart it. What does this do? Oh, look at those comments. So go back to mine and say, okay, so here's where you can actually save the video to your camera roll. Nice. So lots of share-ability. I can also share it to my stories on Instagram. Let's see what happens. Let's just, we'll just post it. I'm trying to find my Tiktok link, share profile, copy link. Let's go back to Instagram. Let's add it right here. Let's just double check that. This works. Amazing. Okay. So I guess I'm officially putting it out to the world that I'm on Tiktok.
I'm going to tag you. Do you want to be tagged in it? Yeah. Yeah cause you have no idea what's about to come. I mean obviously I'm getting sucked this black hole of entertainment because it is pretty entertaining just looking at my own creation. I haven't even found other people yet who I want to follow. So I'm definitely gonna keep exploring as they say. And I'm gonna check back in on this because it was certainly fun. In terms of the business potential it's looking like those hashtags are pretty, pretty powerful. So I'm excited to see, like, when I check back into my video, are there going to be views even because I use those hashtags, clearly no one's following me. I'm not following anyone else. So if I do get views they would be purely based off of those hashtags. So to wrap up, what's the actual real deal with Tiktok? I don't know yet myself. I literally just posted my first video, but I'm definitely going to check in on it again and I recommend the same to you.
If you are interested in being an early adopter to social media platforms, maybe you wish you got on Instagram like six years ago, then this would be a good app for you to get familiar with today. Do what I just did. Download it, play around with it. Post your first video. Again, no one's watching. It's very low stakes and let's check in with each other again, maybe in a week, maybe in two weeks about how we're feeling about Tiktok. My greatest piece of advice is to have fun. I'm all about social media. That doesn't actually waste your time. It grows your business. So if you're into that, make sure you hit that Subscribe button and the bell right now. To ease and revenue. I'll see you in the next video.
Hey friends, it's been 24 hours since I posted my first Tiktok video with a whopping zero followers and I mean the content was riveting. So let's see if it got any views. So I'm opening up Tiktok right now and I am greeted with some of the trending video as per usual. Sweet. Let's look at my inbox. Okay, so I'm seeing some notifications. I'm seeing 130 plus people viewed my profile yesterday. Okay. Okay, that's pretty cool. Let's go to my profile and there it is. One video, 15 likes, I now have two followers and my video has almost 500 views. 15 hearts. I have a comment. Someone said, Awesome. I even had people responding to my poll. Most people said it wasn't a productive workday. Amazing. So within 24 hours my video has 492 views. That is so cool. And I'll show you my team member's profile. Kaeli, she put up a video when we were doing our research and within 24 hours her video got over 800 views. Now she didn't use business hashtags, she used jiujitsu hashtags, so it was probably like already pretty niche and community based, but her video did really well too with zero followers.
So that's pretty cool. I am going to keep experimenting with Tiktok. It's going to be my platform for "just for fun" content. You know what I mean? Like it won't really be business related. At least I don't think so. But anytime I feel like goofing off or dancing around, I'm just going to put it on Tiktok and entertain my, uh, two followers and see what happens. So pretty cool. Oh, they're showing me local stuff. That's really cool.
Okay. I can't look anymore..