By Arianna Crawford, The Social Media Explorer
The Big Valley Marketing New Platforms Series is a collection of posts that aims to introduce B2B marketers and communications to new social media platforms that may enable them generate new, innovative and uniquely meaningful approaches to reaching out to and interacting with their audiences. Adopting and maintaining new channels is a long-haul journey and will take time before any return on your investment. If you’d be interested in partnering with Big Valley Marketing, feel free to drop us a line at hireus@bigvalley.co
TikTok requires little introduction as the short-form video app is the fastest-growing social media platform. It’s also keeping people’s attention longer, with the average user spending approximately an hour a day on the app.
Can B2B find a place amongst the GRWMs, dance trends, and memes?
Yes, because 33% of US adults now say they use it, including ~25% of people ages 50-64 (a.k.a business decision-makers), according to Pew Research. The key, of course, is short-form vertical video and a lot of it – and not necessarily the polished, produced video of YouTube or LinkedIn. Keep it casual and keep it consistent with your brand. Product demos, day-in-the-life employee content, and brand storytelling are all examples of B2B-safe TikTok content strategies.
It’s the right fit for: Brands willing to embrace creativity, experimentation, and humor in their content, even if it doesn’t seem like an obvious tie-in to product or service priorities. Brands on TikTok must be able to act quickly, execute a large yet cohesive content calendar, and prioritize community engagement. Think Shopify, HubSpot, Canva, and Zendesk.
Ask yourself:
- Does my social team have the human power and autonomy to create and post content quickly without extensive reviews?
- How flexible are my brand guidelines? Can I live without perfection?
- Do we have the resources to create a large volume of video content?
- Do we have a person or people willing to be the face of our brand on TikTok?
Audience
- Size: ~2.5 billion monthly active users and growing. A diverse audience looking for a diverse set of content.
- Behavior: People spend a lot of time on the app, but are primarily watchers, so most of the time spent on TikTok is spent watching a small concentration of accounts.
- Relevance: The audience is younger at this point, but that is quickly changing as more and more adults join the platform.
Ease of Management (8/10)
- Tools: As a platform that has fully embraced consumer brands, TikTok has a full suite of creator tools to make management easier.
- Infrastructure: All you need to start is a smartphone, an internet connection, and a lot of video ideas.
- Moderation: TikTok allows a decent amount of brand control and gives you the power to approve, report, or delete comments on your videos. However, overall content moderation is up to TikTok’s automated-human moderation policy – and false flags have happened.
Content Strategy
- Uniqueness: Vertical video and live stream events weren’t anything new, but TikTok is holding the crown on the market, which means all the trends are starting there.
- Fit: It’ll take some creativity to get B2B-safe content to work on the platform, but it’s not an impossible challenge.
- Transference: Now that Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, and LinkedIn have also embraced short-form, vertical video, TikTok content can easily be posted on most platforms, but it may not be appropriate for every platform.
Overall Impact
TikTok hasn’t been a traditional B2B social media platform to this point, but it is too established to ignore. To take advantage, brands must be willing and able to relax formal brand guidelines and strategies that work for other communications avenues and embrace creativity and spontaneity.
