As the exciting newcomer onto the social media scene, TikTok is currently exploding in popularity for brands and individuals alike. As such, individual content creators and creative agencies alike are spending countless resources trying to learn how to get more views on TikTok.
It’s a trick we recently managed by making one of our longest-held clients go viral with more than 960,000 views and counting and over 2,548 likes – just with one short video.
So, how to make your TikTok go viral based on our approach? Read on to find out!
Making VODEX go viral on TikTok
Southampton-based VODEX Ltd is a market-leading business supplying health and safety solutions to companies in a vast array of industries, helping them comply with HSE’s legislation around hazardous substances with a variety of local exhaust ventilation solutions.
As you might imagine, ‘local exhaust ventilation’ isn’t the kind of phrase that gets searched for in great numbers on the world’s fastest-growing social media platform. So making videos about that is certainly not how to get more exposure on TikTok!
Instead, we were able to get eyes on VODEX’s business with a totally different approach, as seen in this video:
@vodexbeautyextraction Thanks Paul 🙄😅😂 #nailtechlife #nailtechproblems #nailpro ♬ This family makes me want to murder people – Big bad vampire out here!
Looking at this from a commercial perspective, you might be thrown realising what it doesn’t do.
- It doesn’t tell you what VODEX Beauty Extraction is or what it does
- It doesn’t tell you anything about the company’s products or services
- It doesn’t give any discernible call to action to interact with the brand.
In fact, the post itself seems completely incidental from VODEX’s business. Yet in other ways, it tells you everything about the company’s personality that you might need to know to want to work with them.
And that’s the whole point – as we’ll explain below.
Our quick tips to going viral on TikTok as a brand
While there is no set formula for how to go viral on TikTok, these four points neatly sum up the approach we took with the VODEX viral video…
1. Be relatable and human
If there’s one pointer for how to get more views on TikTok regardless of who you are, it’s this. But it’s especially true when you’re producing content for a brand.
Companies are chock full of employees who deeply believe in what they’re selling or offering. With that mindset, the obvious approach to marketing can become “We get it and we love it. So if we tell people about it, they’ll get it and love it too!”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way – particularly on a social platform as fast-moving as TikTok.
Consider these two points:
- On TikTok you have around four seconds to grab the attention before someone swipes to the next video.
- Modern consumers are very savvy and simply hate being sold to – particularly on platforms they go to for entertainment, rather than retail purposes.
Trying to make people care about the products and services you care about so they’ll buy them isn’t what TikTok is there for.
It’s there to show real people doing real things that we can all laugh, marvel and gawk at.
If you’re a brand, TikTok therefore offers a chance to make your business feel a little less faceless and a little more personal.
The video above did that because it humanised VODEX by showing a very relatable human mistake and gave the brand a chance to publicly laugh at itself. Even if people don’t know what VODEX is, that kind of warm-hearted self-deprecating content can be the starting point for building brand awareness, allowing VODEX to appear approachable and develop an ongoing relationship with its followers.
2. Grab the attention quickly
As mentioned above, you have around four seconds to grab the attention on TikTok. If you don’t, people will swipe right past it and it’s game over.
We achieved that by placing a simple, short line of text over the video explaining exactly what the viewer was about to see if they stuck around past a few seconds. And because the video contains just the kind of clanger that mostly anyone can relate to, it did its job of keeping people sticking around – and often acting to like the post too!
3. Use audio to add humour
Another important tip to going viral on TikTok is to use the full spectrum of media available to you – including adding trending audio clips that can bring the context of the video to life.
Our viral VODEX video adds an audio clip from TV show The Originals that says “This family makes me want to murder people.” And while that may seem a little dark on the surface, in the context of the video it comes across as a light-hearted playful facepalm, while also conveying that VODEX is a family-run business with family values where people can make jokes like that in good spirits. All of which serves to tell an endearing brand story about the kind of company prospective customers could end up buying from.
4. Pull back the curtain on your business
The video above is also a great example of how to go viral on TikTok because it gives viewers a behind-the-scenes glance at real life at the company. You not only get to see the company’s store rooms, but you get a very quick snapshot of the fun dynamic between its staff members – and this case the family. All of which goes back to that first point about humanising the business to make it more relatable.
People feel much better about buying from real people than from an amorphous corporate entity, so pulling back the curtain to let people see real day-to-day life in your organisation is one of our top tips to going viral on TikTok for brands of all kinds.
What we learned from going viral
Everybody wants to go viral on a platform like TikTok. It’s both a badge of honour and a brilliant way of building a following and gaining brand recognition.
But in real-world terms, what was the upshot of going viral?
Well, as mentioned above, this was a comedy post with no reference or prompts to what the brand does or sells. All of those views, likes and comments might have helped grow the company’s TikTok follower numbers, but they contributed to just a small upswing in website traffic, with no meaningful spikes in sales or calls to VODEX head office.
That’s not to say this was a pointless exercise – far from it. It just means that businesses should temper their expectations. Following these tips to going viral on TikTok may not equate to instant uplift in your over-arching big business key performance indicators. What they will do, however, is help to build trust in your brand, to a point where you can start producing helpful, informative video content that can conceivably carry a buy button – or point viewers to a place where they can learn more and purchase if they choose.
Social media marketing is always about the soft sell, but perhaps our biggest tip to going viral on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or anywhere else is to keep creating content, keep trying new things, and keep growing that audience. Sometimes all it takes is the right person sharing your post at the right time to take your brand to a whole new level.
Struggling with how to get more views on TikTok and other social sites?
Talk to our social media team about how we could help your business get exposure across the social media channels that mean the most to you and your audience.
