By Carey Sperry-Brown: Digital, Media Consultant, Tech Blogger and Podcaster
The podcast currently has 34 episodes available.
Hello, and welcome to Carey Sperry, all social Y'all podcast. I'm your host, Carey Sperry. On All Social Y'all, we discuss how to employ social, to become truly customer centric. We identify how social is a fuel for business growth. And we talk with some of the best and brightest business leaders, entrepreneurs, and digital marketers, our guests share inspiring stories and effective tactics to discover, interact, and emotionally connect with customers where they are on social platforms.
I want to share with you all, we're almost to a thousand downloads subscribers on Carey Sperry, all social y'all. And I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening, for sharing this, these episodes, for being with me through since we've launched at the very end of November of 2019, and here we are 30 episodes in, and we're almost to a thousand. Then our goal is to grow to 5,000 and then 10,000 and help more and more people and spread the word with more and more people about how their business can be helped by, you know, futuristic looking ways of doing business with social media and other digital ways to interact with customers. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hope you enjoy this episode.
TikTok
Currently ticktock has over 1 billion users and has been downloaded over 123 million times in the United States alone. It has surpassed Twitter and Snapchat and popularity yet it's less saturated with ads. 60% of ticktock users are gen Z, but a ton of people and other age groups are now spending time on TikTok to explore, be entertained or to learn over 36% are over the age of 30, according to Statista in less than 18 months. The number of us adult TikTok users grew 5.5 times and 90% of TikTok users visit the app more than once a day. TikTok's business page says , "don't make ads, make news, make it interesting. Make a new trend, make a connection, make someone's day." They say, "TikTok for business is where you can unleash your brand's creative side. A fully immersive, no judgment world where there's an audience for every voice, no matter how big or small your business, no matter what you're making or selling, we believe your brand deserves to be discovered here."
They state that their users are one, - at the forefront of the latest trends and movements. So if you want to be relevant, this is one way you can express that relevancy is more important than ever. Consumers really value that personalization. A study by Accenture showed that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations in the past. Messaging was more general or, you know, basic by observing your customer data. You can understand what is relevant to them and curate a content and video marketing strategy around what their likes and preferences are. These will make your brand able to connect with people where they are,
And innovation - It is reported by Salesforce in their 2020 marketer survey, as the number one top priority. Number two is engaging customers in real time. Their survey showed a flip in marketers top challenges with number one, being engaging with customers in real time. And number two innovating. They state that today, customers seek more and new types of information from businesses through more and new types of channels. When Instagram Stories took hold, people got used to short form video content. People started preferring it at times to consume short form messaging. The great thing about tiktok videos is you can save them to your phone and repost them on other social media platforms. So what I mean by that, short form content that we've gotten used to is when you sit down and you know, in your dentist's office, your doctor's office, wherever you might be waiting for an appointment, you've got a quick car ride where you're the passenger, you know, you can consume and be entertained or learn something.
It's easy to figure something out in a very short period of time now because there's more short form content. It's not like you have to sit down for 30 minutes or 20, even five minutes, right? Chipotle ran a hashtag challenge. The brand launched the challenge on TikTok, created a video and chose a song to go along with it. Then they challenged users to produce their own version of the same video and song with that hashtag. So Chipotle did one #guac dance that went viral. They timed it around the national avocado day in 2019, and ended up being the highest performing branded challenge in the United States with over 250,000 video submissions and 430 million video starts during a six day timeframe, holy guacamole y'all! What did this result for them financially? Well, they served 802,000 sides of guac. Chris Brandt their chief marketing officer said we were blown away by the passion people have for our guac and the enthusiasm for national avocado day.
He said, "the overwhelmingly positive responses as seen in both our digital orders and the 430 million hashtag guac dance, tiktok videos confirm our fans real appreciation for Chipotle's handmade guac." That's what he said. Collaborations with influencers is super helpful to boost views, engagement and conversion. Guess, the clothing brand, collaborated with a YouTube star, Brent Rivera. He has (Brent) has 13.1 million subscribers on YouTube. Guess, plus Brent did a 15 second video around Valentine's day of Brent in Disney world with one of guesses tee-shirts on holding a bunch of heart shaped balloons with a young lady licking ice cream. The tiktok video got 1 million views over 881,000 likes and hundreds of comments and shares. Of course, it's important to remember to collaborate with influencers who match your jibe with your demographic. Don't just go with those with millions of followers. That's not just about that and give the influencer some creative input to the piece because it'll come out way better, more authentic and recognizable as them not just like acting for the brand so that their followers will know. You know, they're not just acting like someone else. Hope that makes sense. At Emily.Capshaw, she is a writer /Filmmaker - wisdom made simple. Um, her company is called CEO of good vibes is what she calls herself. She has almost a quarter of a million followers on tiktok. She teaches people how to find happiness, overcome anxiety, and a link in her bio takes you to a free anxiety, survival guide. It takes you to her podcast and a club membership that has a $5 member per month option. And then a $250, $500 sponsor options. She uses that as an influencer, pretty smart, huh? Another one doing a fantastic job has over 1.6 million followers on tiktak is a colorblind artist at Roni Langley, R O N I L A N G L E Y. She features her art projects, but she also makes videos that help people to get to know her.
Some are funny and others are just her talking about her values and beliefs. Another one is a travel planner, Dina green Beana. She highlights deals, hotel do's and don'ts safety while traveling, et cetera. So how can you get started on tic-tac or consider it as a social media platform for your business?
1 - One, ask yourself, what do customers value in your brand and list out those reasons?
Number two, aligning to that... What can you entertain or talk about or teach them?
Number three, make a sensible order. Like there's a beginning, middle and an end and in the different stages of their journey with your, with your brand. So what I mean by this, as, you know, you might have a week of a theme or you might kind of take them from the beginning of the journey with you kind of like some common questions that people have or needs that they have and kind of map out like some kind of a sensible order that you can post your first set of series of videos on, but just think about what the first one, this will help you determine what the first video will be.
Number four, script out what you want to get across. So you've got kind of what you're going to talk about, but then script out, um, a 60 second or less like a 59 second or less message to get across. Or if you want to do your first one in the 15 second slot, you can do that too.
Number five is get on the tiktok app. This is really important. Spend some time on there to just see what other businesses are doing. Use hashtags in your industry to see what others are doing. And this will really help kind of break down in your mind. What kind of formats and humor and different ways you can go about getting your message across. So some people spend more time than others doing this. I recommend spending as much time as you can, because the more time you spend on tiktok, the more exposure you'll get.
Trust me. It's not going to be a waste of time because I can promise you you're going to laugh at least once. And, it's pretty neat how different individuals come across in different ways with their brands. Also observe how people are setting up their bios. Think about using linktr.ee. It's spelled L I N K T R dot EE to give users the ability to go to multiple pages, to take action with your service or product offerings. So linktr.ee is a website / application that you can subscribe to. It's very inexpensive. I want to say like seven to $11 a month. And then this allows you to put the link in your bio. When people click through to it, there are options for you to customize the different buttons that users can click on to take them.
Like I was saying, the one lady that has the guide, the free guide, you know, things like that. If you have a podcast that service can take people to your podcast for them to listen, it can take you to a landing page to sign up for X, Y, or Z. That's what that is.
Number seven, when you're ready to create your first video. I do most of mine longer than 15 seconds. You can go up to, like I said, 60 seconds on tiktok but in plain video mode, I do it on my iPhone camera. And then I piece them together on an app called Splice. Then you save the video to your phone and tap the black plus button at the bottom of your screen on tiktok and find your video and just add it. Tiktok number eight is choose your music song or audio by clicking on the sounds button near the top of the recording screen.
This is optional. I have noticed that they get watched and picked up and more views when I add music. But it's not required and not all of the videos on tikTok have music. So in that portion of the App, it will show you new releases and different genres and trending playlists. You can adjust the original sound and the music sound as you want it. So let's say you're talking in your video and you want people to hear what you're saying. Then you can put music in the background of your voice quietly so that they hear your voice more. So you just move the, um, I forget what it's called, but you just move your finger to like increase the volume of your voice. And then you move your finger to decrease the volume of the music. So you can completely customize the sound in the app.
There are a bunch of effects that you can use to in your content, but I'm not going to get into that in this episode. Number nine, tap the red circle with the white check Mark at the bottom, and then tap next, right? What you want to say at the bottom of your video and put a few hashtags and you can also tag people or add links. So this is just the same thing guys, as it is on other social media platforms, you know how you write with your post, you write something in the field of writing and you put hashtags and you tag people.
Number 10 post 'er up and let the views come in. That's the fun part. There's something called "for you", quote unquote for you on TikTok - the videos at TikTok places in your feed with the videos of those who you follow that aligned to the preferences that you have demonstrated in your behavior on the app.
Okay. So what this means is the algorithm takes those preferences and finds videos of users who are, you are not following and suggest or reveals them to you. So if you find you love someone's content, then you can like and decide whether or not to follow up, follow them. So for you users, abbreviate, quote unquote, "F Y" is short for, "for you". And sometimes if they find you via F Y - for you, they will let you know, in the direct message portion - the direct message portion of TikTok. So I'm just going to kind of break this down visually for you, if you're not on TikTok yet, is that the way TicToc works is that it'll feed you the videos of the people that you're following. If it's the first time you can just go into like a main feed and just scroll through content.
And then once you're following a bunch of different people it will connect to the algorithm as you're behaving, like watching videos all the way to the end or watching videos more than once. Like you'll just let it go and go and go a few times or you're liking it, or you're going into the comments and commenting on it. It's going to learn like all the other algorithms do what your behavior is and what your preferences are and such. So if I'm doing a lot of activity around dogs, cause I love dogs and I'm following a bunch and I'm commenting and, making, likes and stuff, it will put videos in your feed for you. It will feed me new dog creators videos. And so that's what all that's about. So if someone does that and they put F Y in your direct message, that just means, they're trying to tell you, Hey, I found you on "for you", like other platforms.
You always want to check your direct messages and respond to people because it's all about, you know, supporting each other, relating to each other and communicating. There's also a discover feature. The eyeglass icon that opens a field that users can plug in search terms and find your content. If they know your brand name, they can also plug it in under users. So that's like if they're looking to learn more about finances or they're looking to learn more about travel or whatever it is, you know, home organizing, they can put that in there and then you, your video might come up for them to discover there is a live feature of tiktok it's different than Instagram and Facebook live in that it's more a like conversational and purposeful. Um, and I'll explain what I mean by that in a second. And B it's to help creators earn what's called tokens from other other users.
And I'll explain a little more about that too, in a second, but I'm not going to deep in it. Um, what I mean by that is like on Instagram and Facebook live, it's more, um, like that the creator, the owner of the live, right, your life has more of like a formatted, um, purpose to the live. Like usually just don't go online and be like, Hey, what's up, man? You know, you have like, okay, I'm going to go on live and talk about this. W it, it often isn't scripted. It's just from your, your mind and your personality and everything, but there still is in business, especially a purpose to that live like that, a value that you're going to deliver on tick tock. It, yeah. There's sometimes a message being delivered for sure. But it's also a lot just like you go on to give people a chance to directly have exposure to you and talk to you and give you feedback and, um, see you more in like an, an prerecorded environment.
Um, there's a lot of questions on the ones that I've been on. There's a lot of just like support. Um, like I love you so much. You make my day, Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're, you know, you're you do this? Um, they ask questions like what's coming next, stuff like that. It's like kind of just really conversational like that. Um, and with the tokens, they have the system where, when you're on tick-tock for awhile, it rewards you with these tokens. They have different names for them that you can give to creators when they go live and it can translate to money. Um, and that is a whole, it, in my opinion, um, quite detailed and extensive, um, subject in and of itself to learn how all those tokens are are used. Um, so I'm not going to get into it today, but I just wanted you to know that that's one unique feature of tic TOC is these tokens and part of why some of the big creators go on to live, to earn tokens over time.
As I mentioned earlier, the ads are not saturated at all on tic-tac. There are four ways that ticktack offers their ads as with others, just social media ads. You can target, of course your audience by gender or age location, what their interests are and other unique, um, variables, but for more advanced users who want to take their ads to the next level, you can create custom audiences and you can create lookalike audiences to reach more people similar to your existing customers like Facebook. You can use the tick tock pixel to monitor your ad performance, of course, and to measure your results by tracking users' behaviors on your landing page or your website from your ad. So depending on the placements that you choose, your ads may appear in four places in feed, um, the detail page, post role and story. Um, but here are the four offerings.
There's one there's brand takeovers, and these are placed. As soon as the user opens the app, the users can go to the brands, advertising landing page, only one ad shows in its category per day. So every time I open up the tick tock, um, app, I see an ad and either I can watch it, I can take action on it, or I can, um, sometimes it shows me that I can skip it. I don't know if it always allows you to skip it, though. That might be a couple of different levels. Number two is native ads. These are nine to 15. Second ads played between user content or videos, and they can be scrolled past if the user does not want to watch it. Number three is sponsored hashtag challenges. Your brand can pay to sponsor a hashtag challenge, and you'll get a unique banner across the discover page. Users can tap on that and it will take them to your videos that you make doing the challenge yourself while generating awareness of your brand and offerings. So that's like what Pulte did, but this is sponsored.
And, um, for is branded lenses here. You can design a ticktack filter, that's associated with your brand and users can choose the lens when they're looking for a lens for their content for a 10 day period. So tick-tock puts your lens in the top 10 trending. And it also is offered in 2d, in 3d and augmented reality, AR it'll be called it's coming. Something like air brand effect is what I understand. It might be called a, our brand effect. That version will be out later this year, sometime in Q three, partly in effort to compete with Snapchat's lenses. So probably more important if you're going after that demographic, that's on Snapchat. Cause if they like it there, they're going to like it on tick tock. And you just want to kind of appeal to that audience. But if your, if your people are older, um, it probably will garner more attention quicker. Um, but since it's not out yet, I don't really know. The lens will allow users to interact with the physical environment around them, which is kind of cool. I'm excited to see that as for add pricing, to sure that your ads have sufficient budget. The minimum budget at the campaign level is $500 on tick tock. And the me minimum budget at the ad group level is $50
Or a bid. A bid indicates much you're willing to pay
For the actions that you want users to take after they see your ads and tick tock ads manager offers you different bidding methods to select from just like with Facebook after you submit your content it's reviewed and approved by ticktock before it will go live. And some sidebar news, I didn't want to skip just mentioning this because it's kind of major, but it may or may not be something that you choose to, um, stop you from getting on tic-tac and using TechTalk. Um, you know, I do believe that the other platforms are going to come out with tick tock, like feeling features. I'm sure they're all thinking about doing it. Tick tock is owned by a Chinese company, so it's headquartered and owned in China. Um, and this is the news that came out this past week resulting from a crisis that has been going on for a couple of months.
India just banned Chinese apps. So I'm gonna read you this quote from the wall street journal, India banned dozens of Chinese mobile apps, including widely used tick-tock. And we chat after a border clash between troops from the two countries left 20 Indian soldiers dead this month, new Dell high cited cyber security concerns and blocking the Chinese apps from one of the largest and fastest growing markets in the world. A senior Indian government official said the band was imposed because the apps might have been used to harm India's defenses, as well as to send a message to China rising tensions. Since the clash between the Indian and Chinese armies along their disputed border in the Himalayan mountains has been accompanied in India with calls for the government to retaliate against China. It, the raw street journal continues to go on by saying research from sensor tower estimates that the 59 band apps have accumulated 4.9 billion downloads from Apple inks, India app store and alphabet Google play since January of 2014, including 750 million.
So far this year of the top 25 most downloaded apps on India's app store and Google play since April eight were for, from Chinese publishers. Take talk is bigger in India than anywhere else outside of China, owning to the South Asian natives, massive population and legions of young and largely unemployed fans in that, in that country. Um, so, you know, end of quo, um, there's also some speculation that China is using tick-tock to gather data for their own benefit for their country's benefit and not for other countries, but that's like another tangent. Um, I just wanted to mention that because it is in some people's, you know, dialogue about other things that are behind tic-tac, but you know, the bottom line is, you know, just know more about it to at least consider so that in a couple years you don't look back and regret that you didn't even pay it one bit of attention in your business. I also, again, if you're used to it on, um, the app itself, when the other platforms come out with it, you'll already have your game on, um, it's not for every business by any stretch, but it may maybe great for you. I know many people that are doing awesome with it, besides the ones that I've already mentioned. So let me know what you think about tic-tac for your business. Hope everyone has a great week.
Thanks for listening to the all social ya'll podcast for free resources and materials, head over to all social y'all dot com. That's all social, Y a L l.com. Also we'd love to hear from you. What subject areas would you like to hear about in future episodes? You can share that with us by dropping me a comment on our website or in Instagram at all social y'all.
The podcast currently has 34 episodes available.