If you heard TikTok as the next big thing for optimizing marketing Return on Investment (ROI), you heard right.

Boasting a community of more than 800 billion active users worldwide, TikTok is the social media platform that you need to keep your eyes on for 2022.

No matter who your target audience is, you sure can find them on TikTok.

Leveraging the platform now would mean staying ahead of the curve. If you are in the B2C sector, this platform is even more critical to future-proof your brand success.

However, the question here is how?

Being present on the platform might give you the headstart but cannot deliver growth opportunities.

The true power of the platform is unlocked when you go beyond the basic optimization of your profile.

This blog post exactly answers this question. It gives you a complete roadmap on the ingredients that can help you grow your TikTok following in 2022.

5 Steps to create a highly Engaged TikTok account in 2022

Before we dive into the 9 factors that can prepare your brand’s account to draw massive engagement and traffic, it is critical to understand the foundations here.

TikTok has the massive opportunity of creating video content for your audience. However, the real engagement lies with its primary feed, the ‘For you page’.

This feature offers personalized content for each user based on their video browsing behavior history.

This means your content only stands a chance to perform when your audience likes your pages and videos, interacts with your content, or consumes them regularly.

The only problem here is that achieving this status is tricky.

You need the support of advanced techniques that can help you gain this position. What are these techniques?

In the following section, we take a look at these techniques.

1. Know your audience

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This critical step might look obvious on the surface, but look closer. If you are not careful to find your audience, your content will inevitably fall flat.

To do this right you need to start researching your audience.

Before you lay out your strategy, map out your audience behavior. What kind of content are they consuming, when do they come active most frequently, what are their demographics, geographical locations. Get to know them.

With this data in hand, crafting content that is tailored for your target audience becomes much more tactical and result-driven.

Remember, the highest converting content always focuses on entertaining and educating its audience. This should be your primary goal here. This will help you foster real connections and build a community in the long term.

But this is not all.

There are many more strategies that you can use. Here are some advanced ideas on how you can learn more about growing your TikTok account.

From creating short 60 second videos, participating in viral challenges, going live you test every format and optimize what works best for your unique audience.

Another key step to remember here is that your content should function as a lead qualifier by itself. There is no point in attracting traffic that is least relevant to what your business has to offer at the end of the buying funnel.

2. Leverage technology

Tools might not look like an important element of growing your social media account. But believe us when we say, with the continuous growth of social media usage, nothing can help you better than social media management tools. They can leverage your way into growing your follower base in the shortest period of time.

While you are just starting, having a thin follower base is natural. At this stage growing your TikTok engagement can hugely benefit from TikTok growth tools.

Tools that help to reach your audience in the shortest period of time.

Although follower-increasing tools might not be a great option in the long term for engagement, it exactly solves your purpose during the initial days.

The sudden follower boost that these tools give to your account signals the algorithm of TikTok to promote your account with their relevant users.

From audience research to hashtag research, and follower growth tool, there is a tool for every critical task. Using all of these effects can take you one step closer to the engagement you want to achieve for your brand.

Here are a few tools that you can consider.

a) Askattest

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When it comes to audience research, Askattest is a leading consumer insights platform that you have in hand. No matter who your audience is and what you need to know about them, this tool makes it dirt easy for you to find insights that can help you create content that is tailored to your audience’s interests.

b) InfluencerMarketingHub’s hashtag generator

Influencer Marketing Hub’s free hashtag generator tool helps you to generate relevant hashtags for your TikTok video in seconds. All you have to do is upload your video and wait till the tool generates your hashtags.

c) FeedPixel

FeedPixel is a powerful social media management tool when it comes to managing your social media account on TikTok. You can use it to buy followers, views, and likes for your brand during the early days. The best part is it supports 75 languages.

3. Optimize for visibility

If you thought optimizing your content quality and relea=vance for your audience would do the trick, then think again. Chances are you might get disappointed.

Here’s the thing.

You created awesome content for your audience, invested significant resources in it but your audience could not even find you. Does that sound like a mission accomplished?

On the contrary, it is far from that.

This is why hashtag research is so critical for ensuring content success on TikTok. It makes your content visible to a maximum audience that is relevant to the content. But, to do this right, you need to have a strategy.

Blend your hashtag category to create a well-rounded strategy. Include branded, trending, business-specific, and general hashtags. You can even add a few hashtags that target emotions.

Here’s an advanced hack.

While researching hashtags, you will see that TikTok will generate suggestions for you automatically. It also would show you how often the hashtag is used by creators across the globe.

If your content matches the context of any of these hashtags, chances are you can go viral.

4. Build relationships

At the core of building a strong TikTok presence lies real human connections. Relationships that you grow with your audience through your content. However, here’s a little reality check.

You cannot create a robust marketing pipeline alone with TikTok. You need to think of your interaction with your audience as a whole. Take a 360º look.

A single point of interaction over TikTok wouldn’t develop your brand reputation in front of your audience. You need to integrate other channels too. Stay where your audience already hangs out. This would make your strategy comprehensive and alleviate the complete user experience of your audience with the brand.

Here’s what you can do.

Promoting your TikTok videos over other platforms is one of the best ways to improve outreach and engagement in the long term.

Ever noticed how many TikTok videos are viral on Facebook and Instagram? It is all because of the power of the cross-promotion technique for higher engagement.

Here, a key consideration is to focus on building a community. An ecosystem of like-minded people. Not only should you share your content, but you also need to ensure that you promote the content of other content creators in your niche.

This will help you boost your brand identity faster. But this doesn’t mean that you share other creators’ content that is not relevant to your unique audience. The sweet spot for you lies in content and audience relevance.

Yet another critical point to remember with TikTok engagement is that you need to actively engage with your audience. You are building a community here after all.

5. Capitalize on Tiktok’s algorithm factors

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With time, marketing is increasingly becoming a game. Whether it is Tiktok or Instagram, understanding the algorithms and making your content appear on as many screens as possible is crucial to win this game.

Here are some of the top algorithm factors that you may want to consider:

1. For You page
2. User interactions
3. Account and device settings
4. Video information

But how will you make these algorithms work in your favor?

1. Make the first best impression
2. Use the most trending filters and sounds
3. Takes cues and tips from top Tiktok influencers
4. Keep the average watch time of your videos really short
5. Use the most trending hashtags
6. Leave your duet options open to others

Conclusion

TikTok is no doubt TikTok is the rising star of all social networking sites.

However, today’s truth still is that it is still not mainstream like other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Although it has already gained traction, it will be some time to become oversaturated.

Remember you still have the early adopter advantage. Leverage the platform right and you will experience a sudden spike of traffic and new customers even before you know. The best part?

Your brand presence can become dominant on the platform for your niche in the long term.

Author bio: Atreyee Chowdhury (LinkedIn)

Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as a Content Manager with a Fortune 1 retail giant. She is passionate about helping small and medium business owners and agencies achieve their content marketing goals with thoughtfully crafted SEO content. Be it long form articles and blog posts or website copywriting, email sequences or press releases, she has worked on every kind of format. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time.