How to Use TikTok for Business in 2024: My Ultimate Guide

First things first, you’ll need to set up a TikTok Business account, or convert your existing Personal account. Once you do this, you’ll have access to TikTok Business Center, where you can:

• View analytics activity from your audience and the performance of your posts
• Create and manage ad campaigns

How to Switch a Personal Account to a Business Account

It only takes a few moments to change your account type and this can easily be done within the TikTok app.

• Go to the “Profile” tab
• Tap the three vertical lines in the top right corner
• Go to “Settings”
• Select “Account”
• Finally, tap “Switch to a Business Account”

All that’s left to do is select the category relevant to your business and add both a bio and email. The last two are optional but I’d recommend inputting both – the former will provide buyers with more ways to contact you and a bio is the perfect place to pop important business information.

Get Verified

That blue tick often seen next to usernames is small but mighty. It essentially verifies your identity and trustworthiness to anyone that comes across your account. While not necessary, it’s valuable for any business, whether you’re selling on TikTok Shop or on your own website.

To apply for TikTok verification, click “Verification” in the account settings, which is right above where you switched to a business account.

You’ll have to meet the following criteria, which is:

• That you’re an active TikTok user who has logged into your account in the past six months
• That you have a public account
• That you have a completed profile, which means filling out a username, bio, profile picture, and publishing at least one post
• That your account is secure with a verified email address and two-step verification

To verify your business, you’ll have to apply with a legitimate business that corresponds to your business name. For example, to create a TikTok account for this website, I’d apply using an email address ending in @websitebuilderexpert.com.

Setting goals as early as possible will keep your content focused, purposeful, and consistent.

Your TikTok goals should help achieve your overall business goals, and they should typically focus on increasing reach, engagement, or conversions, or sales.

The easiest way to start progressing with your goals is to break them up into small, achievable objectives that you can measure:

• Increase TikTok follower count by 3,000 in the next quarter
• Receive 3,000 TikTok profile views within the next two months

You can now use these to shape your TikTok strategy and monitor your progress.

Since there are so many types of content you can make on TikTok, you should create a strategy indicating your key focus areas. This will form part of your wider social media strategy.

Use the platform as a potential customer

If you’re a new TikTok user, this will help you get to grips with the TikTok interface and algorithm and understand how different types of content interactions affect the visibility of a post.

The main areas to familiarize yourself with are:

• The top bar – where you toggle video feeds, between accounts that you’re following, accounts you have a mutual relationship with, and the popular “For You” page (FYP)
• Search functions – the suggested search for the post you’re viewing is at the bottom of screen
• Interaction – on the right hand side is where you can see likes, comments, saves, and shares

Research your Competitors

Your competitors’ pages will give you an indication of the content styles and posting schedules that work best within your niche. To find them, search TikTok for any keywords and phrases relevant to your business, and browse through the videos and accounts.

The TikTok algorithm will recognize your searches and push related content onto your FYP, which makes it easy to find people within your target audience.

Find your Target Audience

Your target audience are the people you’ll be trying to attract to your profile, so it’s important to have a clear picture of them before you start posting. Think about your customers’ age groups, genders, and interests and anything else they have in common.

If you don’t have a customer base yet, creating one, or multiple, user personas will help you visualize the people you’ll be targeting.

First impressions count for a lot. When users come to your profile, they need to get a clear picture of who your brand is and what it’s offering.

To achieve this, you can optimize elements of your profile so they show clear conscience information representative of your business.

• Profile picture: This should ideally be your logo, but any image that strongly represents your brand will work.
• Bio: Your bio should be short and provide only the key description of your business. You can then add a bio link to your website for people to visit for more information.
• Playlists: Organizing your content into playlists will make it much easier for users to navigate your profile, especially once you start to build up your content. Make sure the titles are short and descriptive of the content in it, like Adobe has done above.
• Post thumbnails: Again, well-considered thumbnails will make navigation much easier for visitors to your account. After filming your video, you can edit your thumbnail from the same page as where you add your captions. You can either upload your own or use the editor to add descriptive text over a clip of the video.

Optimizing all of these areas will help your account to get discovered in relevant searches, and when it does, ensure that your profile visitors get the most accurate and informative picture of your brand.

Brainstorming TikTok content ideas was my biggest struggle when I first started using TikTok for business growth. The sheer amount of content appearing on my FYP was overwhelming, since lots of it wasn’t related to my brand.

Finding the Creator Search Insights tool was a gamechanger. It’s essentially Google Trends, but for TikTok, you can see what users are searching for within your industry and use it to generate unique and valuable content ideas. Some of my favorite features worth exploring include:

• Content gap: Topics often searched for that don’t have enough relevant content
• Searched by followers: Search terms your followers are interested in
• Trending: A list of trending search terms that can be filtered by industry

Creating Engaging Content

Creating engaging content isn’t as daunting as you might think. You don’t need fancy cameras or editing software to do well. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. TikTok users like content that they can relate to and connect with, and brands are no exception to this rule.

With this in mind, here’s how you can keep your content fresh and fun:

• Make the first few seconds count – TikTok users will scroll to the next video within seconds if their attention hasn’t been caught. Cut to the chase straight away and introduce the main point of your video at the beginning – whether it’s a new product or a flash sale
• Use CapCcut templates – the free video template app is often at the forefront of TikTok trends. Its integrations with TikTok mean that if you see a video on TikTok that has been made with CapCcut, you can tap its logo to be taken directly to that template within the app. These are great for hopping onto trends quickly and take seconds to film!
• Switch up your post types – if you only post traditional TikTok videos, try carousel posts with multiple pictures, or audio voice-over videos. This will help you to reach new people and show different sides of your brand
• Use popular video formats – try new styles of videos that have been successful for others

Search engine optimization (often referred to as SEO) involves tweaking parts of your content to improve its visibility when people search for it. Implementing TikTok-specific video SEO is the main way you’ll consistently reach new TikTok users and grow your business online.

Keywords help to categorize your content and connect it to TikTok users with similar interests, either by pushing it to their FYP or showing it in relevant in-app searches.

You should think about the keywords or phrases that relate to your brand and TikTok posts, and include them in your content in the following ways:

• Speaking them
• Adding them in on-screen text using TikTok’s video editor
• Using the caption of your video, either as they are or as hashtags

To find trending terms, I’d recommend using the “Creator Search Insights” tool – specifically the “Trending” tab – since it’ll pull its findings directly from TikTok instead of Google.

If you have a specific area in mind, start to type it into TikTok’s search bar. The predictive suggestions underneath will instantly pull up popular key phrases that include the word you typed.

For your post to get maximum engagement, timing is everything. Well, not everything, but it’s an important factor. If you post at the same time your followers and target audience are active, your post will get attention and be boosted from the get go.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a clear cut answer to this. Your industry, niche, location, and audience demographics will make the perfect posting time different for every business.

This said, studies have found that there are some windows of high-engagement time that multiple industries have in common:

In general, Wednesdays and Thursdays have the highest-engagement time periods, and Sunday tends to be the lowest. 

Once you build a following you can see a more accurate picture of the best times to post by looking at your audience analytics, where you can monitor the times and days your followers are most active.

To access this data:

• Tap the three vertical lines in the top right corner
• Select “Business Suite”
• Go to “Analytics”
• Click “Engaged Audience” to see all demographics, including when they’re most active

If you’re willing to put money into using TikTok for your business, paid ads are a great way to maximize your online presence.

Once you have a Business account, you can access the TikTok for Business platform and make use of its Ads Manager tool – this is where you can view and manage all of your paid advertising content.

You can organize your TikTok ads into groups and those groups into campaigns. A singular campaign can have up to 999 ad groups, and each of these can have separate goals and keywords.

A clothing store may want to promote winter coats. This may be its campaign. It might divide these into men’s coats and women’s coats, which would be two separate groups that its ads could be organized into.

How Much do I Need to Spend?

You can set a daily or lifetime budget for your TikTok campaign, which determines the overall cost of your ads within that campaign. The minimum spend for both options is $50.

You’ll also be able to set a daily budget upwards of $20 for your ad groups.

For individual ads, TikTok uses a bidding model that gives you control over the cost per result of each ad.

• Dynamic daily budget – will recognize high or low opportunity days and adjust your daily budget accordingly, spending up to 25% over your daily budget on high-prospect days. Your weekly spend will still average out to the price you set, but it means that you can maximize the effectiveness
• Accelerated delivery: is an ad delivery type where the system will help you spend your budget and get your targeting results as quickly as possible and maximize the effectiveness of reaching your audience.

You can’t expect to master using TikTok for your business straight away. Trial and error is the best way to strengthen your unique TikTok strategy, but identifying these areas is key.

Circle back to your goals and consistently measure your progress by monitoring key metrics. You can do this using third-party analytics tools, but when you’re starting out, I’d say the native analytics within the TikTok Business Suite are more than sufficient.

Now, this step is last because it’s not entirely necessary, but knowing how to source and work with influencers can be a great way to boost your brand’s visibility and sales.

Influencers are often categorized by the size of their following and labeled as micro, macro, nano, and mega influencers. This separation is useful when you’re budgeting since usually, influencer rates will increase as the account gets larger.

Micro influencers tend to have upwards of 2,000 followers and offer the cheapest rates. For new businesses, they’re a great introduction to social media collaborations, and they often have a lot of influence over their audiences.

Top tips to source influencers:

• Search your keywords on TikTok – the video results will contain lots of related content created by TikTok influencers
• Search influencer marketplaces online – these are great if you’re looking to source multiple influencers quickly
• Make sure their content aligns closely with your niche

With over one million active monthly users, utilizing TikTok for business can be a great move for a number of reasons:

• Increases brand awareness – its unique algorithm and fast-developing search engine make TikTok a brilliant method of brand discovery
• Promotes products – TikTok will be your best friend for any limited time deals or upselling, especially if you combine free advertising with paid digital marketing
• Extra revenue streams – not only can you build relationships on TikTok, but there are plenty of money making opportunities like with live streaming and TikTok Shop

That might seem like a lot to take in, but the best way to learn is by getting stuck in! So create your TikTok Business account and start creating content for your target audience. Focus on posting consistently, and make sure your content is TikTok SEO-friendly and relevant to your audience.

Remember – experimenting with different formats and posting schedules is the best way to figure out what works for you and your audience.