On this episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I want to talk about something that a lot of people in marketing are not really using at the moment, but the youthful generation are, and that’s TikTok!
Now, I’m not a massive TikTok user myself, but I do really appreciate the reach that you can have with TikTok. For example, I’ve got a number of videos on TikTok of snippets from comedy performances that I’ve done that I’ve been experimenting with. I’ve uploaded them to Instagram reels, to Facebook reels and to TikTok because I wanted to see how the reach varied between the different platforms. On Facebook reels I got something in the region of just over 1,000,000 views across three or four different videos. Instagram was something in the region of about 25,000, so it’s dwarfed by Facebook reels. TikTok is just a little bit below Facebook Reels, so TikTok is in the hundreds of thousands again. Using TikTok can give you a really really high reach.
Now, one of the things I’ve been itching to do for a long time on TikTok is to do with TikTok Live. Because you can go live on Facebook, you can go live on LinkedIn, you can go live on Instagram, but TikTok has prerequisites to go live on. If you Google this, it’ll tell you in order to do a TikTok Live you need to be over 18 years of age and, most importantly, you need a thousand followers minimum. You cannot do a TikTok Live without a thousand followers. I really want to do one because I’ve got ideas about, for example, doing a TikTok Live while recording a podcast like this. The advantage with doing a TikTok Live as opposed to say a Facebook Live or Instagram Live is that the reach is much higher.
I thought there’s got to be a way around this. There has to be a way to do a TikTok Live with fewer than a thousand followers, and lo and behold, I found that there is a way you can do it. I did a live recently I at the time of doing the live I had 630 something followers, way below the thousand threshold. This is what happened…
About six weeks ago, I started getting emails about TikTok Shop. I always ignored these because I have no interest in setting up a TikTok Shop account, but I thought I’d try it because helping people with their e-commerce is what we do in marketing, so I’ve got to give it a go. Unfortunately, I fell at the first hurdle, which was to set it up as a business it requires you to add your business license as a required field. Of course, we don’t have business licenses in the UK, it’s not a thing. Therefore, you cannot set up a TikTok Shop as a business in the UK because it’s a required field. I thought there’s got to be a way to do it because I know people are doing it. What they do is they don’t set it up as a business, they set it up as an individual, so that’s what I did.
I created The TikTok Shop and then you get the option of connecting it with your TikTok account so that you can then promote it. As soon as I connected it with my TikTok account, the TikTok Live function clicked into shape immediately. I did a live to prove how it works and we got hundreds of people watching it, as opposed to when you do a Facebook Live where you could end up with a couple of dozen people watching it, if you’re lucky.
If you are seeing this and thinking ‘I want to do a TikTok Live but I do not have a thousand followers’ then here is what you do:
- Firstly, create a TikTok Shop. If you’re in the UK, do it as an individual, not as a business. You do not have to add any products, just create the TikTok Shop. There’s a few hoops to jump through in order to do it, but should only take about 20 minutes.
- Connect that TikTok Shop to your TikTok account so that it puts the shop link in your profile.
- Once that is there, you will find that you will be able to do a TikTok Live, regardless of how many followers you’ve got.
You could have one follower, it doesn’t matter. You will be able to do a TikTok Live. I’m absolutely delighted that it works. Now, if you found that useful, I hope you have, we have loads of stuff like this on our online learning platform EngageWeb.Club. All you have to do to join is go to EngageWeb.Club, where you can enter your email address and your name and create an account. Then, you will have access to all of our digital marketing resources, which teaches you everything you need to know about social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It teaches you all about Facebook Ads, you’ve also got everything you need to know to do search engine optimisation for yourself. The whole process of doing digital marketing is there for you and it is currently just £5+VAT per month. That’s all.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Engaging Marketeer. I hope you’ll join us at EngageWeb.Club, even if it’s only for a month, to see how fantastic everything. I’d also love it if you could to leave me a review, no matter what platform you’re on. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
