Join our podcast host RichE as he chats with Helen Polise, aka the TikTok Teacher. She used her background in film production to help her dive into TikTok during lockdown. And it worked, bringing in 536K followers on TikTok!
Helen’s content went viral, but her strategy was simple: just documented her interests and life, and experimented with the platform’s suite of tools. Tune in to learn about her best tips and tricks for growing your business on TikTok.
How to Connect with Viewers
Helen recommends that businesses focus their media strategy on a specific audience. RichE encourages everyone to explore the platform and experiment.
Helen stresses that any brand’s job on TikTok is to provide value to your viewer. However, you don’t have to make tutorials everyday to provide that value. Helen points out that simply making someone smile or feel better brings value too.
Being Authentic Is the Key
Helen and RichE make note of the value of authenticity and transparency in connecting and relating to your audience.
If you are going to do a promotion, make it a TikTok video. Don’t make an
Don’t focus on selling in your TikTok strategy. Invite viewers to connect and get more content through your other platforms.
Working with TikTok Trends and Tools
A trend to explore on TikTok is “stitching.” This is a feature for reaction and response videos. Stitching lets you take part of someone else’s TikTok video and use it in your own TikToks. Stitching can make it easier to start creating your own content. You can also use stitching to connect new content to your existing content.
Another insight Helen shares is to recognize trends and memes, but look beyond them to create something that feels like it expresses your individual brand’s identity.
Organizing Your TikTok Content
Use headlines on video covers for organizing your profile, and to help viewers navigate your TikTok page.
Not sure how often you should post on TikTok? According to Helen, a new post every one to three days will keep up the engagement without feeling overwhelming.
Viewership can ebb and flow, so try to make content worth sharing, liking, commenting, and rewatching, and you should find success.
TikTok is still new enough and
Want to learn more? Connect with Helen on her TikTok, Instagram, or website.
Highlights:
- “The thing is adding value, no matter if you’re a business or just a person on TikTok. What are you adding to someone’s life? That’s when you can change the game, create the following and grow your audience because you’re doing something for them. You don’t have to teach something. You can be adding value to someone’s life by the way you make them feel every day when you come on.”
- “I don’t necessarily try to sell something on my channel. So I don’t feel like I need a niche account. However, for a business you do wanna be in your lane pretty heavily and lean into it because that’s where you’re gonna grow quicker.”
- “I want to just address that: ‘make TikTok, not ads’ because that was a really good statement. I interpret that as even if it’s an ad, make it a tiktok. They’re not saying ‘don’t do advertising or don’t promote’, they’re saying that if you’re gonna do the promotion, make it a relatable tiktok. You want it to not feel like an ad. You want it to feel organic.”
- “One of the things I notice personally on my own account is when people tend to share, send it to people, and save it
– those have almost like a higher rating in the algorithm somehow. So if you’re putting value out that people want to refer back to, that seems to help it. Because I have a lot of posts that have tons of comments, but they didn’t really get a big amount of views. So I’m thinking, comments aren’t really maybe necessarily thathigh-rated compared to saves and shares. Cause the minute you have people saving your content, that’s when your numbers are going up.”
