What will 2021 TikTok marketing look like? Don’t ignore increasing market penetration or this quirky social video site’s young, engaged, and fresh market.

Developed by ByteDance, a Chinese company, TikTok lets users produce, edit, and share short videos. The social media platform’s editing features include the ability to add sound effects, musical overlays, and video effects.

Even though TikTok has only been around for a few years, it’s attracted a large, enthusiastic user base and more than its share of controversy. At the same time, businesses have just begun to explore the potential of Tik Tok marketing. Find out what makes this site unique and how a social media agency might use it to attract an audience.

What makes TikTok unique?

In order to start to develop a marketing plan for TikTok, it’s important to understand its unique character. Effective social media content writing for this video site differs from content development for Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Twitter. As a very general impression, most people would describe most popular TikTok videos as quirky.

With some notable exceptions, a marketer would probably call the site’s content more entertaining than newsworthy. Exceptions to this might include Claudia Conway, the daughter of the former presidential advisor and of course, high-level critiques of the site’s privacy and security.

As for more typical examples of popular videos:

• One piece played upbeat music as the presenter sprayed shaving cream into a Croc and then stuck her foot inside to splatter the shaving cream through the holes.
  
• Another video started with suspenseful music as a hand drew back a curtain to reveal a wide-eyed cat.

Even though the videos sound silly when described, they were both worth a watch for a quick grin. To gain a better feel for this kind of short, amusing video content, watch this compilation of popular Tik Tok videos on YouTube.

Can social media services benefit from TikTok in 2021?

Look at some eMarketer predictions for TikTok in 2021:

• After 95-percent growth in 2019, eMarketer predicted growth of over 21 percent this year.
• By 2021, the platform should have over 50 million users.
• Young people make up most of the audience, with slower growth among older users.
• At least one out of five social media users will login to TikTok at least once a month by 2021.

Right now, the platform lacks the penetration of such established social sites as Facebook and Twitter. Still, it’s the only large social media site with growing penetration. In fact, eMarketer compared TikTok’s position to that of Facebook in the first decade of the 21st Century. A savvy social media agency might view this new, growing platform as a good place to test creative marketing ideas and a chance to get in on the ground floor before it grows saturated with ads.

How to plan TikTok social media content development

Mostly, marketers look at TikTok as more of a place to build brand recognition than to generate direct sales or leads. Now and probably into 2021, the most popular kind of marketing campaign on the site is called a Hash Tag Challenge. These challenges can rapidly increase visibility and also encourage popular influencers to join in.

To understand how a hash tag challenge works, look at a couple of examples: 

• Guess ran a challenge to build their audience and launch a new line of denim jeans. They ran the campaign under the hashtag of #inMyDenimChallenge and motivated users to produce music videos while wearing the new denim pants.
  
• Burger King called their challenge the #WhopperDance. They offered coupons for $1 Whoppers to encourage users to produce their own dances. 

TikTok offers hosted challenges. These include increased visibility and a special page where the promoter can list their terms and display the challenge videos. These hosted challenges cost quite a bit, but smaller businesses can still succeed by creating and promoting their own challenges.

For one thing, TikTok offers other kinds of ads that businesses can begin with a budget as low as $50. A small business could use these cheaper ads to test their strategies and to promote an independent challenge.

Will TikTok remain fresh in 2021 and beyond?

According to HubSpot, some other social sites have tried to provide features that recreate the TikTok experience, but their efforts haven’t successfully pulled users away from the original. Because the site is still fairly new and growing, it can provide a fantastic opportunity to get noticed by engaging in creative marketing. Plenty of marketers would love a chance to revisit Facebook marketing back in its early days. Experimenting with TikTok may give them that chance.