How to grow your business using TikTok

With more than one billion monthly active users globally, TikTok has become the fastest growing social media platform on the African continent. 

TikTok has not only changed the way users consume content, but also changed the way brands and businesses create and share their content respectively. 

Here are three key points to keep in mind in order to grow your business on the shortform video content platform. 

Social Graph vs. Interest Graph 

While other platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram make use of the social graph when distributing your content, TikTok introduced the "For You" page specifically designed to show you personalised content that you might be interested in based on your actions. 

What this means for your business is that you no longer need to build up a following on your social media pages in order to go viral or gain a reasonable amount of views on your content.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

While Google remains the world’s leading search engine, followed by YouTube. TikTok has gained momentum among Gen Z as the search engine of choice with more young people opting to use TikTok when searching for products and services. 
 
What this means for your business is that when posting to TikTok, you need to consider your video caption as well as the text on your thumbnail, and make sure it's SEO friendly, the same way you would with an article published on your website.

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Trends 

Many would be familiar with hashtags used to index keywords or topics on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in order for people to easily find you in topics they are interested in. 

With TikTok, there are multiple ways to help people find you and you may layer these trends on top of each other. 

For example, apart from hashtags, you also have the sound trend where you could use a viral sound or song for your video. Furthermore, there are various challenges happening and you also have the options to create a Duet or Stitch video.