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Should TikTok be part of your company’s marketing campaigns? Maybe you think the audience isn’t there, or it’s not a serious enough platform. TikTok marketer, Austin Armstrong, believes otherwise and he’s helped professionals reach and engage their audience on TikTok, driving leads and sales. He shares how in this week’s episode of the Agents of Change podcast.
Rich: My guest today is a lifelong digital marketer, public speaker and CEO of Socialty Pro, a digital marketing agency, specializing in TikTok marketing for businesses and search engine optimization. Yeah, those two things together.
He has posted over 1,800 videos on TikTok, tripling his own business, and thousands more across his client’s accounts. He loves helping individuals and companies grow their online presence in order to generate brand awareness, customers, and product sales, by getting creative and thinking outside the box.
So let’s jump into TikTok and how you can use it for your marketing, with Austin Armstrong. Austin, welcome to the program.
Austin: Rich, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure and an honor.
Rich: This is going to be exciting because we haven’t, as I mentioned to you, we haven’t really touched on TikTok in any formal way here on the show. So I may ask you some basic questions, bring an old person like me into the know, but we’ll see where it goes.
Right off the bat, obviously you’re sold on TikTok. What do you feel are the benefits for using TikTok?
Austin: Well, right now it’s the largest organic reach of any social media platform. It’s the fastest growing platform of all time. It’s the fastest to 1 billion users. There’s over 100 million active users in the United States alone, and it’s growing rapidly day over day. There’s just no better platform right now to get really fast, organic reach around whatever it is that you want to talk about in your business.
Rich: So I’m going to ask the question that I’m sure a bunch of people are asking, like, what about my audience? My audience isn’t on TikTok, my audience isn’t young, isn’t TikTok just for millennials and Gen Z?
Austin: That is the common misconception that I hear constantly. Where I think that misconception comes from, is the lack of amount of people in every industry that are actively creating. As I was just saying, there are over a hundred million active people on TikTok right now. That number alone points and tells you your audience is on there. They might not be creating content. Other business owners in your niche might not be creating it, but they’re lurking there. They’re observing and seeing what it’s about. So the first time you log on to TikTok, it doesn’t know what to serve you, right. It just wants to immediately throw you into content. You have to sort of train it to see what you’re interested in. And by creating content, training other people what your page is about.
So you might see some videos around kids or pranks or dancing or something like that, because those are inherently popular videos on the platform. But the more that you engage with content that you’re actually interested in and in your industry, you’re going to see more of that. And then you’re going to begin to see what an opportunity it is.
Rich: All right. How is TikTok different than the other social media platforms?
Austin: So it really grew quickly because of short form vertical content. Now every other platform has sort of, tried to catch up. Facebook and Instagram are always stealing features from competitors, so we have Instagram Reels and whatnot. But it immediately throws you into the mix. So as soon as you open the app, whether you have an account or not, you’re served with videos. And all of these videos are typically short, 30 seconds or less. As of this week, actually, they just rolled up to 10 minutes in upload length. So they’re actually expanding the content. But that’s what really made it unique off the bat. There’s a lot of really cool features involved in TikTok as well. The ability to respond to a comment with a video, which is very powerful from a business owner’s perspective as well. Somebody asks you a question, in a comment you can do a video response to that. The question pops up on the screen, you can provide an answer and nurture that audience.
It’s really engineered to be addicting, which I think is why it’s been so fast growing in every industry, every demographic. Because from the moment it was created, it’s just dopamine hit after dopamine hit. And the algorithm learns so quickly what you’re interested in and what you’re not interested in, and serves you more of what you’re engaging with and watching on a longer period of time. So I think of all the social media platforms, it has one of – if not the – absolute best algorithms for serving content for what you are interested in.
Rich: So I feel like you’re kind of cheating and looking at my notes. Because my next question was all about the TikTok algorithm and how it works. I know that doing some research into algorithms for another episode, the guy who was in charge of the YouTube algorithm actually went to Congress and said like, this is dangerously addicting what TikTok is doing. Can you speak at all, more than you have perhaps, about why the TikTok algorithm so addicting, and why people are drawn into this platform in a way that they are?
Austin: Yeah. So you can quickly train the algorithm on what your page is about from a content creator perspective or as a business perspective, also as a consumer perspective as well.
So from a consumer perspective, which is where everybody begins, right? They don’t open the app and immediately start to create, we typically consume first to see what’s going on. And as you’re going through things, there’s tons of search functionality to look for things, you don’t have to randomly wait until you get a video in your industry.
You can search for videos, search for hashtags, search for creators that are in your industry. The longer that you watch those videos, the more that you engage with them, if you heart that video – which is like liking it for instance on Tik Tok – or if you leave a comment on that, or you share that video with a friend or yourself. If you send it to yourself via email, or you can send it to a social media profile. The algorithm says, okay, this person is interested in this subject matter because of all of these metrics, right. They watched this. They engaged with this on various reasons. And maybe even, so they followed this creator after watching that video, that’s where the algorithm clicks in and says, okay, I want to keep this person on the platform longer.
I’m going to serve them more videos that are similar to what they just watched. So the more that you engage with what you’re interested in, the more of that, that you’re going to see, and it works so fast. If you spend a couple like an hour. On the platform, just training it a little bit, just scrolling through, which is so easy. Because it’s just video after video, there’s no end, right. It will quickly see what you’re interested in and continue serving it. That’s how it’s so addicting as well as it’s endless, it’s an endless feed of videos.
Rich: Austin, if someone’s listening right now and they’re not super familiar with the platform, how would you recommend they even get started, after maybe downloading the app, if they haven’t done that?
Austin: Yeah.
Rich: Keeping in mind that their ultimate goal is to use this as a marketing channel.
Austin: Absolutely. So I would begin by consuming and consuming as much as you can. Consuming things that are outside of your industry that are very popular, but beginning to look at similar creators in your space.
So at the bottom of the app, as soon as you open that up app up, there’s a bunch of tabs down at the bottom. There’s a Discover tab, and that if you click on that, you’re going to be able to do some searching. So you can type something related to your industry. For instance, I’m an agency owner that specializes in search engine optimization as well as TikTok, so I could type in ‘SEO’ or ‘search engine optimization’ or ‘website tips.’ And when you search for that, it then unlocks all of these other tabs of things that you can search for it. So it shows you the top performing posts around whatever you’re searching for. You can also click on accounts so that you can see accounts that are related to search engine optimization. In this example, you can see videos that are associated with that. You can see all of the hashtags that are associated with that as well. And how many views each one of those hashtags gets.
This is where strategy really comes in. And I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about a strategy that you can leverage as a business owner. But look through all of these things and see what competitors are doing or other people in your industry. See what videos have performed the best. Really pay attention to how they’re executing those videos. How are they opening it within the first couple of seconds? Are they jumping right into education, or are they talking about themselves a little bit? Are they showing examples? Are they showing case studies? Are they leaning into trends? What are all the things that they’re doing, internalize this so that you can begin to model their success and model what is working on the platform with your own unique perspective and voice and opinions, on all of these things.
Rich: All right. That makes a lot of sense. And obviously it takes more than just a few minutes to do this. But you’ve done your research. You see what else is out there, maybe how you can improve on it, but you get an understanding of the rules of the road on TikTok. How do you recommend that somebody fit TikTok into their current marketing strategy?
Austin: Whenever there’s a new platform it becomes overwhelming. We as business owners, we’re already like, oh my gosh, I have to be active on Facebook. I have to be active on Instagram, YouTube. I’m so behind on video. I have to do my website with SEO. There was that Snapchat thing that I never really liked. I have to be active on Twitter. This is just another thing. It’s not going to be right for everybody, but if you lean into it, it is the most opportunity right now. So you have to think where your time is, because this is going to be a commitment. It’s a new platform, it’s a new thing. But we live in a really interesting bubble of time in the social media marketing landscape right now, that because of the rapid success of TikTok, all of those other platforms are playing catch up.
So what’s really working right now, is you can adapt your strategy around TikTok and simultaneously grow all of your other platforms. And what I mean by that is leaning into short form vertical videos. A vertical video is as it’s described, vertical looking at your phone up and down. If you’re looking at a YouTube video, that’s typically a horizontal video or on your television, that’s typically horizontal. But vertical is an easier way to consume for people because they’re on their phones vertically all day, right? They’re reducing the steps. All of marketing and progression of technology is reducing steps to make it easier for us. Easy for us as consumers, they’ve literally reduced the step of turning your phone sideways, like content was consumed up until recently, right? So they’re inherently creating content for this. Regardless. Now you can create short form 6o second or less vertical videos. I recommend educating your audience around the services that you offer, the products that you offer, take them behind the scenes. You can highlight testimonials. You can jump on and answer frequently asked questions that they have. And create these videos and you can repurpose them across all of your social media. You can post that video on TikTok, you can post that video on your YouTube, on your Facebook, on your LinkedIn, on your Twitter, on your Google My Business page. That’s how I would evolve this strategy into what you’re currently doing. I would pivot and go all in on short form vertical, because it’s working like a charm right now.
Rich: Your puppy is very excited about Google My Business, which is awesome. So here’s my question. So I’ve seen a lot of brands out there just take a TikTok video with the TikTok branding on it, and just upload it to say Instagram. What’s your feeling on that? Do you do that, or is this maybe kind of looking a little bit lazy on some of these other platforms?
Austin: So it is, and I would be wary of doing that because Instagram, for instance, has told us that they are deprioritizing content that has that watermark and other platforms are moving that way as well. Even if you see videos on Instagram or on other platforms that are performing very well and have that watermark, all of these platforms are moving in the direction of deprioritizing that content that has that. So I would just take the short, extra step to remove that watermark on there.
And there’s a couple of different ways that you can have the strategy. One is by creating content on your phone, not within the app. So if you’re creating content and editing it in vertical format, then you can upload it to each platform natively. I create an app in TikTok because I find that to be the easiest process for me. So then after we post that video on TikTok, we use a website called snaptik.app, S N A P T I K.app. And what you do is you just paste in the URL of that TikTok video, it automatically removes the watermark from that video and gives you an MP4 file, a video format, a file that you can then post across all of your other social media platforms. It removes that watermark, and you don’t have to worry about that ever being a problem.
Rich: Interesting. All right. Very cool. And so I guess, what are the pros and cons of recording in-app, versus just recording video in vertical standing, and then just uploading it to TikTok, assuming that’s a viable option?
Austin: So the TikTok in app video editor is very intuitive, so there’s a lot of benefits to creating in the app. You can add background music right in there. You can easily adjust the volumes. You can edit your clips right in there to cut out the ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’ or cut out frames right in there to make transitions really seamless. You can add stickers on your images, you can add a gifs on there. You can add, there’s tons of filters built into it as well, including green-screen filters. So you can add in images that you download from your phone or even green screen video. So you can have video playing in the background and it sort of crops around you. It does a really fantastic job of doing this so you can be in an outdoor area or wherever that you want when it’s green screen. It’s a little clunky, but it’s still there and it’s very effective. And what I really love is that you can add text on screen at any given time. You can add a title to that, which I really love from a repurposing stance.
So what I do is the first two seconds of the video, I will put a title of what that video is about the value proposition of that video. You can then choose the thumbnail of that video that displays on your profile in TikTok. But the reason I do that in Tik Tok is because I can download that video and use that frame as my thumbnail across the board. So when I’m reposting that on Instagram or YouTube or Facebook, it already has that title right in there so that people know what my video is about, which increases that click through rate on every platform. It’s a very easy to use video editing software directly within TikTok. That’s really the pros. If you’re more familiar with like Adobe Premiere or any other video editing app, it’s a new thing to learn, so that would be the con. But it’s just a time saver, too.
Rich: Do you know of any sort of boost that you get within TikTok when you use the TikTok app to make the videos, versus when you import them in from another tool?
Austin: I haven’t seen it really make a difference at all. I shoot in app and most of our clients. My video editor edits in Adobe Premier, and then sends us the files to upload, and both perform the same exceptionally well. So, I don’t think that matters much. That’s a preference to you.
Rich: At this point, somebody is like, okay, I see how this might work for me. Whether it’s educational, brand awareness, what have you, what are some best practices for creating videos, especially within kind of the marketing realm that tend to perform well and engage users on TikTok?
Austin: So all good marketing is really providing education that resonates with your target audience. You don’t want to sell, sell, sell, because nobody wants to listen to an infomercial over and over again. They want to follow you because you’re providing them with value that they can take away and implement. So leverage your expertise and provide them with value.
I’ll do a video on three tips to improve your search engine optimization on your website, or here’s how you can get your website pages indexed faster on Google. And I provide them with this information. They can take that video and implement the steps themselves. They have the knowledge I’ve shared with them, how to do it. They can go about and do this. Why that matters is because even if you provide them with everything, all of your best information, they’re not going to do it because they don’t have the time. They don’t have the means. They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t have the accountability, right. This is where you come in. But they know, like, and trust you. Because you’re providing them with all of this information for free, they’re more likely to contact you. That’s the type of content that works really well. Because of the short attention span on TikTok, I wouldn’t even introduce yourself. I would just jump in, “Here’s how you can get more website traffic… bada bing, bada boom”, so that they can take that video and immediately implement. Because if you start your video off with “Hi, I’m Austin Armstrong, I’m the CEO of Socialty Pro. We’re a digital marketing agency”, I’ve already lost them. They’re gone. They don’t care about that. They don’t care about you as the business owner, sorry, that’s the blunt answer. They care about what value that they’re going to get out of that video. So know that and give them all of your best information. Give them that value.
Rich: How important is it to jump on trends? Like I’m not super familiar with TikTok. I’ve used it mostly as a consumer, but I know that sometimes people will jump on trends, not necessarily for business, but because it gets them more views. They use specifically popular music on TikTok because it gets more views. They’re using some maybe filters again, because it gets them more views. What are some of your recommendations about trends, background music, or any of these other tools that TikTok-ers use to get more visibility on the platform?
Austin: Yeah, so trends are very helpful. They can be. They’re not essential for growth. I want to make that clear. If you don’t want to jump on a trend you don’t need to, in order to be successful. You can create just educational videos and be wildly successful more than you will ever believe and be totally fine with that. If you want to jump on trends. It can help add fuel to the fire a little bit in some cases.
So how TikTok works, it’s pretty interesting. Every filter and every sound indexes all of the videos that use those filters and sounds. So by jumping on a trend that’s using a specific sound, there’s like a wave of people going into that trend. Well, they’re going to look at all of the videos that are indexed in that feed. But the other thing that’s happening here is, again, going back to the algorithm, everybody’s watching this style of video, what’s it going to do? It’s going to serve you more of that trend, right? So it pulls from this, it pulls from this feed of, I’m watching more of this trend because I want to jump on this trend. I’m going to see more videos about this trend. Your video is going to be in that pool and be served to people that are engaging with that trend.
The same thing as is the case for filters that you put on. The filter is clickable on your video. So if you apply like a green screen filter or face manipulation filter or whatever there is that’s clickable on your video, so people can look at that filter and see all of the videos that have been indexed with that filter. The same thing. They go to that filter, they’re looking at videos, they’re going to get served more of those videos.
Rich: It works like hashtags on Instagram it sounds like.
Austin: Absolutely.
Rich: Okay. And so you can go through and see what’s trending right now. I’m assuming that just because something’s trending, doesn’t mean it’s going to be good for your business. So it should be, I would assume, something that’s in alignment with what you are. And I’m just looking at it ‘When women Win’, as a trending hashtag right now as we’re talking, that if my business serves women, is women owned, whatever it may be, that is a hashtag that perhaps I should create some content that brings that in. But if it’s unrelated to my business, I’m like #emo, then just leave it alone.
Austin: Yeah. It’s a great point that you brought up. So a couple of things. So yes, you don’t have to jump on every single trend, because it’s not going to be applicable to your business. The thing that I’ve really noticed is by the time that TikTok highlights that is a trend, it’s almost at its peak and it’s almost too late to jump into that mix. So pay attention to that.
But a better way to do this is, I hate to say it, spending more time in the app on the “For You” page. The more time that you spend, the more similarities that you’re going to see you’re scrolling through. You’re going to see, oh, I’ve noticed this particular similarity. This is a trend that’s happening over and over again. These are rising trends. That’s really when you want to get in on it. You want to get in on these trends as early as possible. These trends that are on a huge rise or I’m not going to be indexed on the Trending Discovery page because they’re not there yet. The ones that are highlighted on that trending page already have millions of videos in the mix. And if you think about it, with that much competition, you’re just a small drop in the bucket. So you want to get on these trends. And the best way is to really pay attention to it.
There’s TikTok accounts that are entirely dedicated to trend alerts. The first person to come to mind as a great TikTok marketer, her name is Wave Wyld. She does these TikTok trend alerts. I’d recommend if you want to jump on trends, I’d recommend checking her page out because she pays attention to these early trends that are coming up that have, instead of millions of videos and people that have jumped on it, maybe there’s only 10,000, maybe there’s only a couple thousand. That’s when you want to jump into this, so that when the millions of people adopt it, you’re already there waiting and reaping the rewards.
Rich: Makes sense. So, one thing that I’m always, I do a lot of lead gen stuff, so I’m always interested in driving traffic back to my website. Is tech talk better for brand awareness or can we use it to actually drive qualified leads?
Austin: Both. I grew my business entirely through TikTok. How you want to generate leads is through that link in your bio. There’s a couple ways that you can actually generate leads. In order to have that link in your bio, you need to have 1,000 followers. Now that is the up-to-date current allowance of that link. What I’d recommend is having something like a Linktree or a beacons or a link expander tool, so that when they click on that one link, it opens a menu of several other links that they can click on. And what you can have here, for instance for me, I’ll have a ‘schedule a 15-minute call with me on Calendly’, which is typically how I convert leads from TikTok into paying clients. But I’ll also have links to my paid courses, to free email opt-ins, so that they get put into an automated email drip campaign. I have video courses so that they can buy that course. They can pay hourly consulting there. I also have marketing deals. So I’m generating income that way, too.
It depends how you want to capture leads and what you want to do. You can put a phone number button in there that they can just click that link and it pulls up the phone so that they can call you in real time. There are tons of different ways to actually capture leads from TikTok. Your content strategy is going to more or less make or break this, right? You want to create enough awareness and buzz around content that’s really helpful. And then, from time-to-time, sneak in a hard sell. Like you might do like a 90/10 educational versus hard selling, or the 80/20 rule, if you will. But it’s okay to sneak in like a hard sell every now and then, but don’t do it every single time. I’ll do a video, like I’m now accepting new SEO clients if you’re a service-based business. Click the link in my bio and let’s schedule a call, and that’ll generate like a hundred leads. It’s crazy.
Rich: Which is a great segue because I did want to talk to you. One of the things that caught my attention as you talk about TikTok and SEO, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a TikTok video in my results, but maybe I just haven’t been paying attention or I’m doing the wrong searches. So what is the connection between TikTok and SEO?
Austin: Okay. So, there’s a couple things here. So I started my business as an SEO agency. I noticed TikTok was this massive, fast-growing platform and a blue ocean. So while YouTube and Instagram and Facebook had tons of SEO experts, nobody was talking about search engine optimization on TikTok. So I said, okay, I’m going to be the first. And there was a couple of other people, but I’m going to do it better. So I went on there and did my thing, grew my SEO agency. I did get on TikTok a little early, I’ve been on there a little over two and a half years now. And then the last year and a half, we just started rolling out these services for other businesses that want to leverage TikTok to grow their business. So that’s where we developed a repeatable process and our expertise around TikTok marketing.
Interestingly, a couple months ago – I think it was October – Search Engine Land, which is a huge search engine optimization blog, arguably the biggest in the industry, posted that both TikTok and Instagram are going to begin integrating videos into the search results of Google, for instance. So if you do this on your phone, they’re still rolling out things, but if you’re on your phone and you type something in like, “TikTok SEO” for instance, keyword term, and you scroll through, you’re going to see a video shelf of TikTok videos. I happened to be in a lot of those videos. It’s a vertical shelf, sliding of tech index, TikTok videos that are clickable and indexable in Google search result that takes you directly to that video. So that is happening in real time right now. It does seem that the precursor does need to have ‘TikTok’ in there. TikTok SEO, TikTok XYZ. But that’s working really well.
Now I have a controversial opinion, depending on who you talk to, that every social media platform is a search engine. People are just searching for information. We talked in the beginning about this, of that discoverability tab and you searching for something, searching for an industry, typing something in, and you’re going to be found. You’re going to find that information. Well, we don’t think of social media platforms as a search engine because we think of Google as a search engine. And even now Bing, and Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, YouTube, is also a search engine, right? People are looking for information, but people are also looking for information on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
So for instance, you can optimize your profile to be found in TikTok, and you can optimize your videos to be found. So display running on TikTok. And this is what we do for our clients is the service that we actually offer. So for instance, my display name on TikTok is ‘SEO and TikTok marketing agency’. So if somebody goes on TikTok and search for ‘TikTok marketing tech’, ‘marketing agency’, I’m going to be there because I’m going to be one of the top accounts. They index it sort of by followers also by relevancy based on competition. But if somebody searches for ‘TikTok marketing agency’, I’m going to be right there at the top. We also do this for services businesses. Like we’re working with a therapist. We have his display name on there as ‘Orange County, California therapy’. So, if anybody is typing in ‘California therapist’, ‘orange county therapist’, ‘orange county, California therapist’, he’s going to be the one that shows up because nobody else is doing that right now.
Rich: So when you’re doing that, the display name as you say, is that different than the account name or the… okay, so just like on Twitter. I’m @TheRichBrooks on Twitter, but I’m Rich Brooks, that’s my name. So that would be my display name in TikTok.
Austin: Absolutely, a hundred percent the same functionality on Instagram as well. Your username is different from your display name.
Rich: So I’m going to put you on the spot here. What’s the benefit of working with a TikTok agency? This could be considered either a hard ball or a softball question. What’s the benefits of working with the TikTok agency versus just doing it on your own?
Austin: We have a repeatable process. We do this over and over again. We’re managing 10 or 11 TikTok accounts right now. So you can hit the ground running. You don’t have to do all of that discovery and figuring it out. We pay attention to these trends. We coach you on exactly how to edit or how to do these videos, how to record the videos. We actually handle the editing. We handle the posting. We work with businesses that, I want the results from this but I don’t want to really do it. I am focused on my business, I don’t care about the marketing side of things. I just want to do what I was meant to do. And we leverage that expertise and do the rest for them so that they can focus on doing what they love.
Rich: What do you do if somebody, like in Orange County Therapist’, is he or she on camera if they’ve outsourced stuff to you, or do you have clients who don’t even show up in the videos?
Austin: So we’ve done both. I would recommend being on camera because they’re going to trust you in such an important field as therapy, right? If you’re not in the camera, I don’t know who you are. I don’t know if I’m going to necessarily resonate with you. I don’t know if I’m going to trust you, so why am I going to call if you’re not even open to being on camera and communicating with me. Because that’s how powerful connections are made is when you get vulnerable on the app and you communicate your expertise. And the power of video in general, right?
Like. I know who you are. I don’t have to, back in the day, right? Like a Google search or even like a yellow page, like call the person up and hope they’re able to help me. And then just go through the list until you find a therapist or find any business that really works for you. That’s the power of video so that you can communicate your information.
Rich: All right. Austin, before I let you go, a couple of short tactical questions. How many times a week should the average business be posting to TikTok?
Austin: I’d recommend at least one per day, every single day. If you can commit to more of that, do it.
Rich: Wow. Okay. All right. And how long, I know that you mentioned actually that TikTok has been expanding the length of videos. How do we decide what the length of our videos should be?
Austin: Short and concise as the best way to go, because how videos continue to surface is really based on video completion rate. So if you’re putting up a three-minute video and going on long tangents, people are only gonna watch like, 1% of your video. But if you put out a really short, sweet, bullet pointed video, 30 seconds long and 50% of the people watch the entire video, that video is going to be served to more people. So as short as you can, but as long as it needs to be, is the real roundabout answer.
Rich: Sure. And have you discovered any days of the week or times that tend to be more effective or less effective when it comes to engagement?
Austin: I’m not the type of person that really leans into that. I think that’s just a crux, if you will. Really good content is going to work for you, regardless of what time that you post it. Now, I wouldn’t post it at 4:00 AM or something like that, where nobody is online.
Rich: Unless you’re a sleep doctor.
Austin: Yeah. Yeah. That’s true. That would be an interesting time. Yeah. So like a scroll stopping, “Are you sitting on TikTok at 4:00 AM right now? Keep watching, I’ll show you how to go to sleep.” That could be an effective strategy for all of your sleep doctor listeners. But as long as you’re in that regular time that people are awake, I wouldn’t worry about it. Just put out consistent good content. You’re going to be fine.
Rich: I’m always interested in metrics. Does TikTok give us any sort of reporting on how many views we have when people are viewing or anything like that?
Austin: Yeah, they do have analytics. They’re not the best. They’re not as robust as YouTube or even Instagram. There’s definitely some analytics that I wish TikTok would integrate. They’ll give you 7, 28, or 60-day overall account analytics from the amount of views, shares, comments, followers. And then you can go into an individual video basis as well and see how many people viewed it, how many people liked, comment, shared, the percentage of use – which is a newer analytics – how much the average watch time on that video, and average video completion rate. These are two new analytics that they put in there. You can also see time of day that your audience is online on any given day, what hour. I believe it’s based on UTM a universal or you UST universal standard time or something like that. So it’s not inherently whatever time zone that you’re in, so you have to convert that. People get into that mistake a little bit, but it’s fairly limited.
Yeah, I wish like they gave us audience retention graphs, like here’s the exact moment where somebody left the video so that I can cut that out moving forward. Or even like, I did a video on this last week, TikTok please give us follower count from each video like this video generated this many followers. That would help me tremendously so that I can do more of those videos that generated more followers. Even if it got less views, it got more followers.
Rich: Right, right. Excellent. Austin, this has been eye-opening. Really excellent stuff. If people are interested in what you’re doing, they want to learn more about you, where can we send them?
Austin: Yeah. So, you can check me out on TikTok or any platform at Socialty Pro online, across the internet. And I just launched a new TikTok for business podcast called Business Tok business. Where I interview real businesses, real business owners that are leveraging TikTok to generate real revenue and sales and taking them behind the scenes. It’s a really tactical podcast. I think a lot of people will find that helpful.
Rich: Yeah, that sounds awesome. We’ll have links to all that stuff in the show notes. Awesome. This has been great. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.
Austin: It was a pleasure and a great conversation.
Show Notes:
Austin Armstrong has gone all in on TikTok marketing, leveraging its unique aspects to help grow his client’s businesses. Tune in to his new podcast that highlights how business owners and entrepreneurs are growing their businesses using TikTok.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 20+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.