Since merging with Musical.ly, TikTok has experienced significant growth. These days, there are essentially two apps: Douyin in China and TikTok in the West. Although it started out as a lip-synching software, users can post a variety of video formats.

We looked at some of TikTok’s startling numbers earlier this year. It’s astounding that in the first quarter of 2018, TikTok was the most downloaded non-game app worldwide in the Apple app store, and it continues to do well. It has more than 1.6 billion users globally as of right now.

Of course, the majority of TikTok users want to gain more interested followers, just like users of any other social media platform. Deep down, we’re all aching for a crowd! We’d all love to be as popular on TikTok as Loren Gray, who has 53.7 million followers.

You don’t need to use phony followers to grow your following; there are plenty of other legal methods. This is our 8-step strategy to increasing your TikTok following and likes.

Step 1: Create the Perfect Profile

Your profile is essential to your TikTok success. It will often be the place where you make your first impression to your fellow TikTokers. If people aren’t impressed by a glance at your profile, they won’t be interested in following you.

Ideally, you should upload a great profile picture of yourself (or your brand if you’re trying to build a business page) as well as a cover picture, and add some engaging text that succinctly tells people about you. You want the overall profile to be attractive to the types of people who you want as followers. Take a look at the profiles of anybody you already admire on TikTok. If you like the style of their bio, then you could create something similar for yourself.

Step 2: Know Who You Wish to Target

Successful TikTokers don’t try to please everybody. You need to create videos that appeal to your core audience. Therefore, you first need to determine who you want that core audience to be.

If you have an existing account, it is worthwhile looking at your current follower list to determine who your “super-fans” are, if you have any. What types of videos do they appear to enjoy best?

If you have created your TikTok profile to represent a business, then you’ll want to create videos that will appeal to your target customers. If you are simply an individual, you are likely to want to have followers who have the same interests as yourself. Your followers may well be similar to the types of people that you choose to follow.

Step 3: Create Interesting Videos That Stand Out from the Crowd

You are never going to become successful on TikTok if you remain a lurker, watching other peoples’ videos, possibly even leaving comments, but never uploading your original material.

You will never be more than an also-ran, however, if you limit yourself to uploading bog-standard lip-synch videos, either. Sure, that’s fine for generally-untalented teenagers, just wanting to be part of the crowd, along with their real-life friends. But it is incredibly limiting to your online social success.

If you have any talent in your niche and even a fraction of confidence, make an effort to produce original videos. TikTok’s young audience probably don’t require that you have hidden depths of technical expertise, but they do expect you to at least make an effort if they are going to bother to follow you.

If you look at the list of successful TikTok accounts, you will see that the vast bulk of them made their name by uploading original, exciting videos that appealed to a sizable group of TikTok’s users.

Step 4: Establish Your Style

Although TikTok has a general appeal to youth and has more female members than males, everybody is different. You certainly can’t generalize the TikTok audience and assume that everybody is generic and the same.

Therefore you will want to develop a signature style for your posts. For a start, you need to pick one or two categories and ensure most of the videos you make fit into those categories. 

Read Also: The Key to Success on TikTok: Utilizing Analytics to Build an Engaged Brand

Sure, TikTok (and Musical.ly) started as lip-synching platforms. But that doesn’t mean that you have to restrict yourself to lip-synching, or even anything musical at all. 

Your style will probably reflect two critical things. Firstly, it will relate to a niche that interests you, you know something about, and perhaps even the areas where you display a unique talent. Secondly, it will connect to the type of people you have chosen to target as an audience. This is particularly important for brand accounts, where you will want to focus on making videos for the types of people who you desire to be future customers. 

Once you have decided on your style and niche, virtually all of the content you create must match your style. There is no point designing your profile to appeal to young dancers and then uploading videos of you cooking food, for instance.

Of course, TikTok isn’t just videos. People generally find videos of interest by reading the captions that accompany each video. Whenever you create and upload a new video, think carefully about how you caption it, ensuring that you make it appealing to your target audience.

You will also want to ensure that you post your videos regularly and restively frequently. For optimal success, you should try and make at least one video per day for your followers. However, quality is more important than quantity, and particularly if you operate your channel alone, you don’t want to promote more videos than you are capable of making without reducing the quality. 

If you set regular times to upload your new videos, your fans will start to look forward to them and will begin looking for them at the times they expect new content.

Step 5: Come Across as Authentic

By creating your signature style, you are effectively creating your TikTok persona. Your fans will quickly discover the real (TikTok) you from your videos. It’s essential that you keep coming across the same way. You need always to be an authentic version of yourself.

Your fans choose to like you because they like what they see. They don’t want you to do anything to upset that image. Sure, you can promote products that you genuinely like and believe in. But don’t try and hawk irrelevant products, or ones that contradict what you have said in previous videos. This can be particularly problematic if you take on influencer marketing work for competing firms.

Step 6: Take on Challenges

Challenges are a vital part of TikTok. They may be significant world-wide challenges, like the Tumbleweed Challenge, or something smaller, specific to your niche. By taking part in challenges, you become more relevant to your community. These videos help you become more noticed, and by using the appropriate hashtag, you are providing another way for people to find your content.

Many challenges have thousands of entrants, which means the videos can become a bit repetitive. Therefore it is probably a good idea to add some personal twist to your challenge videos.

Some other well-known TikTok challenges have included the Fake Travel Challenge, where people used everyday objects and pictures to mimic travel photos to comedic effect, the Raindrop Challenge, where people added dramatic visual effects that mimic a rain shower and halted the rain in pattern with music beats.

Step 7: Use Your Other Social Accounts to Promote Your TikTok Videos

If you wish to become a social media influencer, you are likely to predominantly excel on just one or two leading social networks, including perhaps TikTok. That doesn’t mean that you have to ignore the other social networks, however. Most successful influencers have at least some presence on all the main channels.

You can use your other accounts to cross-promote your TikTok material. You can leverage your followers on one platform to help you succeed on another. This is particularly important if you create custom hashtags because it gives you a broader overall audience for people searching for and using that hashtag.

Quite a few TikTokers also run YouTube channels where they splice together highlights videos from TikTok. This also allows you to take advantage of the different audiences. For instance, TikTok videos usually range from 15 seconds to a minute. YouTube, however, regularly hosts much longer videos. You can package numerous related TikTok videos together into one YouTube highlights package.

Step 8: Collaborate with Others in Your Niche

Don’t consider yourself an island on TikTok. It is, after all, a social network, so you must socialize with others. Reply to every comment that people leave on your videos. Watch other peoples’ videos (preferably in your niche) and leave thoughtful, interesting comments there, that can spark an ongoing conversation. Avoid spammy type comments such as “Nice video.”

Look for other experts in your niche and try and collaborate with them. You will usually find it easiest to do this with other broadcasters of a similar size to yourself, or perhaps a little bigger. You are far more likely to get agreement from them for collaboration than if you try and work with the big names of TikTok who probably receive many offers every day.

How do I Get More Noticed on TikTok?

When someone views your video, TikTok counts the view. Users do not need to watch something for a certain length of time in order for it to be counted as a view, unlike other social media platforms. On TikTok, you’ll get one view as soon as your video begins to play. The same person would give you two perspectives if they watched it again.

1. Keep videos short

TikTok exploded in popularity because it was the first social network to go all in on short-form content. At the time, Instagram and Facebook were both in their infancy and didn’t have algorithms that heavily weighted short videos. But to get more views as a TikTok creator, you need to lean into short-form content. It’s why the platform has a minimum video length of just three seconds.

Shorter videos help capture people’s attention while also increasing your view count quickly. There’s a good chance of people watching the entire video if it’s short, which bumps up your completion rate (a key ranking factor in TikTok’s algorithm that helps you reach even more people). 

Plus, if the video loops back to the beginning after those 10 seconds are up, it’ll count as two video views—even if they come from the same person. 

Even if you have a perfect take, you should still use a TikTok video editor to cut your footage down. Remove long silences, pauses, and false starts. These things alone can easily shave 10 seconds off any video. 

2. Use hashtags in your video description

TikTok is more than a video-sharing site. It’s quickly becoming a search engine—40% of Gen Z audiences search TikTok for answers over a more traditional search engine like Google or Instagram. 

TikTok hashtags help new people discover your content. These can be:

• Industry or topic-specific hashtags, like #beauty or #ferrari 
• Video-specific hashtags, like #newborntips or #skincareroutine
• Brand-specific hashtags if you’re a well-known or popular brand
• Trending hashtags which you can find using the TikTok Trend Discovery tool 

One particular hashtag to pay attention to is #FYP which stands for “for you page”—the main discovery feature and the screen that appears when people open the TikTok app. Videos with this hashtag have amassed over 553 billion views collectively. 

3. Follow viral TikTok trends

TikTok is a platform that thrives on trends. Take one look at your “for you” page and you’ll see a collection of videos that are popular right now. Most lean into trending or newsworthy topics—hence why 32% of TikTok users rely on the platform to stay up-to-date with news and current events. 

TikTok’s Trend Discovery is a powerful tool to find trending topics. Click the “TikTok videos” tab and see a list of the most popular videos. Try to replicate what you see for your own product, niche, or industry.

“Stay updated with TikTok trends, challenges, and viral content within your niche,” advises Joe Bowab, founder and CEO of Lobster Anywhere. “As for my niche, many food trends are happening globally. So, I keep a close eye on what is trending and what food lovers want to see. Timely participation can significantly boost visibility.”

4. Use trending sound effects

Some of the most recognizable sound bites from the last few years originated on TikTok. Users can turn their audio into a TikTok sound for other creators to use.

Sound effects also have their own results page. Anyone can click a sound and see a library of other creators’ videos that use that sound. If you choose a popular sound, the chances of someone viewing this page are higher—immediately giving you a wider pool of people who could choose to watch your TikTok video.