Is a Career on TikTok for You?

Content creation is a challenging career as it requires multiple skill sets in creativity, content production, and marketing strategy. Especially so on TikTok, where you have to strike a balance between being authentic and aggressively marketing yourself. TikTok is filled with virally creative content that is curated by its machine learning algorithms to distribute in users’ For You Page, and competing to earn your spot for that prime exposure can sometimes be daunting. But with TikTok’s explosive growth and 2 billion user downloads, the rewards of being TikTok famous should be worth the effort.

This year, the highest-paid TikTok influencer earned up to a whopping $50,000 per TikTok post, while the average TikTok influencer earns between $200 to $20,000 per post, depending on their followers size and engagement rate.

Thankfully with the tools available today, it is more than possible to turn your passion into the profession of influence. Here are a few essential things to check off your list to jumpstart your TikTok career!

1. Create Quality Shareable Content

Something obvious, but often still underestimated. Creating influencer-worthy content on TikTok is a complex process that requires you to understand the TikTok algorithm. The AI/ML-driven algorithm rewards numbers of viewers, viewing time, shares, and of course, likes and comments.

Content on TikTok must go beyond likeability, and be truly engaging. It has to be something that resonates with viewers in a way that spurs them to reshare it to other users within and beyond TikTok’s platform. Creative and well-produced content can be considered good content, but to stand out from the crowd and become great, your content needs to be shared to create a ripple effect and engage with viewers beyond your existing followers.

2. Find a Niche and Build a Community

Quality trumps quantity in many ways, but in the social media world, the two are strongly intertwined. Numbers of followers contribute largely to how brands see your potential for paid partnership. On TikTok, your followers can also contribute to recurring views which also boosts your rank among other TikTok posts.

But don’t just aim to grow a fanbase, build a niche community that you are recognized for.  Why? Imagine this. A user that has a sense of belonging to your group would be more likely to like, comment, rewatch content, share with friends, share on other social media, and since most users are also creators, ultimately aspire to create similar content thus saving or favoriting your videos or sounds. This checks off most of the actions that would boost your TikTok engagement and push TikTok’s algorithms to feature you on the TikTok For You Page. 

So what do you do? Get to know your audience! Research what they like and dislike, what they create, what they talk about, and how they talk about it. Cater to your audiences’ inclinations and become their go-to TikTok profile for their content consumption demands.

3. Be Friendly but Professional in Partnerships

In attempting to strike influencer partnership deals with brands, you need to build long-term professional relationships and proper credentials in the marketing world. In this day and age, the language of marketing is data, so provide detailed insights of your social media performance that is both presentable and insightful for brands to make marketing decisions. TikTok analytics could help you export reports of TikTok Profiles or TikTok Hashtag campaigns to help brands save time in deciding whether to partner with you and thereby give you a competitive advantage in establishing a professional reputation that brands have a great working relationship with.