Your brand is embracing TikTok. Here’s how to tell if your campaign actually works

The opportunities on TikTok seem to be endless. But to take advantage of them, brands need to learn how this new social media platform differs from its more established counterparts. And, of course, marketers need to know if their campaigns actually work.

For one, brands don’t need to throw significant amounts of money behind a consumer campaign on TikTok for it to gain traction. Dara Busch, president of 5W Public Relations, explains that paid advertising is often necessary to get a large number of views on channels such as Facebook or Instagram. With TikTok, that’s not the case.

“Videos with high engagement are featured on the ‘For You’ page in the app, allowing your brand to get in front of users who don’t follow the featured account, significantly increasing impressions,” she explains.

In other words, TikTok’s algorithm can replace the need to pay to promote a brand or product, increasing potential for awareness and virality. Rhea Woods, VP of influencer marketing at Praytell, likens it more to Twitter.

“Viewership is more curated based on what’s trending, although there is a much greater emphasis on TikTok’s daily sponsored hashtag challenge,” she says.

Another major difference is that audio is central to the platform. Unlike most other social media channels, TikTok defaults to the sound being on, which “makes music a central pillar of the platform,” Woods adds.

The aesthetic expected on TikTok also differs from its social media rivals. “TikTok has proven that you don’t always need glossy video shoots and slickly edited videos; homemade reigns supreme here, and short-form video is one of the best expressions of that concept,” says Michael Lamp, a senior social and digital media strategist at Hunter.

Most of all, TikTok is the chosen social media platform of younger generations, especially Gen Z. Those who are dedicated to the channel spend far more time on it than any other platform, if they even have other social accounts at all. According to Eric Petersen, VP of platform strategy at Weber Shandwick, TikTok may have fewer total users in the U.S. than Facebook and Instagram, but far surpasses them in time spent and engagement.

Users spend more than double the time on TikTok on average compared to time spent on Instagram or Twitter, according to the data Petersen shared. And of these TikTok users, a significant percentage don’t even use other social media channels: 35% are not on Facebook and 61% are not on Twitter.

This high engagement can be attributed to the short-form content that is the norm on the platform. Videos up to a minute long are permitted on TikTok, but those that run shorter, up to about 15 seconds, perform best, capitalizing on consumers’ contracting attention spans.

“TikTok has harnessed the power of condensed content, as short-form video became more and more mainstream for users, creators and influencers and brands,” Petersen says. “Of course, the real trick to standing out is by creating impactful content for [a brand] in that short format. The brand must become a master of the canvas and utilize best practices to make that short view time count.”

So less polished, shorter content, that makes intelligent use of music and sound seems to equate with success on TikTok. But how does a brand measure the success of a campaign?

Increasing brand awareness is often the overarching goal for consumer campaigns on TikTok, so clients are interested in measuring impressions, views and engagement. They’re also interested in other classic performance metrics like click-through and view-through rates and volume metrics like frequency and reach.

“TikTok is largely secretive about the algorithm that determines exposure, but through testing, it’s becoming clear that individual video performance largely determines whether that content will get pushed to more user ‘For You’ pages,” Woods says.

So video views beget video views, meaning more eyeballs will see a given campaign. This also means that unlike other video forms, creation rates are more important than completion rates on TikTok, according to Lamp.

Lamp also notes that piggybacking on hashtag challenges is a time-tested way to increase engagement, so many clients are interested in better understanding how these work and what makes some more successful than others.

These video performance or engagement metrics are available right within the app’s interface. Like many other social platforms, TikTok offers public-facing video view counts, as well as likes and comments. Other metrics, such as accounts reached, average view time, interaction and volume of user-generated content related to a specific hashtag are also available. Yet while this is helpful, TikTok doesn’t share much API access with third parties, meaning that external measurement remains a challenge.

“TikTok’s lack of a true API for third parties to meaningfully pull data is an issue, especially when you’re in the strategy or creation phase,” says Greg Brown, VP at FleishmanHillard. “You want to know what challenges or trends are gaining in velocity, how volume shifts over time, to best position yourself to capitalize on it. And it’s not easy to do that yet.”

That being said, many experts find some third-party tools useful. These include Creator IQ and Brandwatch, which are used to manage influencer campaigns and provide influencer insights, and Dataroma, which can be used as an API aggregate to create client-specific dashboards.

Petersen adds that brands are also interested in whether TikTok drives brand recall. “Many are using built-in brand-lift studies and customer survey functionality as a way to measure the impact of these programs and campaigns,” he says.

TikTok’s Creator Marketplace may soon offer a solution to some of these measurement challenges. The tool is now only available by invitation to some brands and agencies and has a limited number of creators in its database.

But it has a lot of potential. The Marketplace facilitates collaboration between brands and influencers, and it does more than just that. TikTok introduced a slate of traditional analytics tools within the Marketplace in March, which includes real-time insights into views, engagement rates and audience demographics.

Ultimately, TikTok may still fall behind its rivals in the level and sophistication of data and insights it provides, meaning that it remains difficult to tie a campaign to traditional business goals like sales, site traffic and lead generation. However, experts agree that the opportunities TikTok provides make it worth it, with audience demographics that are distinctive from those on Instagram or Facebook and a platform less saturated with brand content than its counterparts, making it easier to stand out.