2023 has been a unique year for social media. From Twitter’s rebrand to X and the overnight rise…and then plateau of Threads; as a digital communications team, we’ve found that some platforms have just not been what they used to be. Learning from this, we turned our attention and efforts to the most talked about social media channel right now, and it’s seems to be paying off.
by Lauren Surtees
It is obvious from the rise of TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts that short-form, informal content is currently dominating social media engagement rates across all platforms. As of October 2023, TikTok has one of the fastest growing user bases, surpassing Instagram’s yearly growth and X’s total users.
It’s a personal bugbear of mine when people think TikTok is just a place for dance trends and teenagers. While they have their place, there’s more to the app than that. Just earlier this year, one of Ofcom’s latest reports found that TikTok is the most popular news source for 12-15-year-olds, while one in every 10 adults also use the app to keep up with the news, overtaking mainstream choices like BBC Radio 1, proving what a powerful tool it can be.
But what can TikTok bring to your digital offer?
A place to target young people – TikTok is our only social media platform in which 18–24-year-olds make up the largest percentage of our audience. We know that we’re hitting that younger audience that we might miss across our other platforms. In addition, due to the data available from TikTok, we can see the ages of those who are viewing each video. Meaning if a video was aimed at a younger age group, we can be confident the messaging has hit that audience and report back to the service.
Different types of content – We have seen a recent decline in long-form video interest across our other platforms, meaning TikTok provides a space for us to think differently with our content and approach our messaging in a different way.
Provides a disconnect from our corporate face – TikTok also provides a place for us to disconnect from our traditional Council branding and be more creative and fun with our approach to topics. Engaging video content allows us to connect with our residents on a different level that they might not see across our other channels, like Facebook.
Although, as a Council we have had a presence on TikTok since 2021, it’s only in the last six months as the channel has continued to grow in prominence that we’ve had a focussed strategy towards our approach to the platform.
In the last year alone we’ve doubled our audience, from approaching 5,000 followers in August 2022 to having 11.3k followers in August 2023, with over 250,000+ total page likes.
Although we have a growing follower base, 80 per cent of our video views still come from other TikTok users on their ‘For You Page’, meaning your audience can be infinite depending on your content and can allow your audience to expand in a short space of time. We recently had an increase of 1000+ followers overnight from a single video which was picked up and shared around by users, due to the localised content.
How we’ve grown our audience:
Decide your aims – The TikTok algorithm is everchanging but one behaviour the app rewards is consistency. Since regularly posting twice a week for the last few months, we’ve gained thousands of followers. Don’t let your profile become a digital graveyard and keep your page updated!
Trends are great but find your niche – We are the first to try to jump on a trend and we’ve had some great success with popular videos and CapCut templates, but we’ve recently found that our own original content is proving just as popular. Keeping content entertaining and localised has brought Doncaster residents to our profile and has helped us establish our niche.
Gatekeep your TikTok – If you can, limit the content on your TikTok from ideas that you don’t think will work. Services will want to jump on the back of the TikTok hype but avoid posting videos if you don’t think they fit in with the overall strategy or will engage with your audience – although do be willing to try new content.
Interact with other Councils and public sector profiles – There’s lots of public sector accounts on TikTok in the UK and around the world. Interacting with them brings users to your profile and provides engagement for both parties. Comment, like and challenge each other to trends. Remember, TikTok comments and captions are just as important as the video itself.
Remember the media are following too – Social media channels have become the go to for many local journalists to pick up news stories, and that includes TikTok. We’ve seen a number of our TikTok videos being picked up by our local media outlets and made into stories, which is a great way on increasing their reach and getting the message seen by a whole different audience.
TikTok content can be time consuming to create, but it is transferable to other platforms. With the rise of short-form video content across other platforms, we have countless examples of a video filmed primarily for TikTok, perform well on our other channels. With the rise of Instagram and Facebook reels, the exact same video from TikTok might soar on Facebook or Twitter.
I know plenty of people that won’t download TikTok due to its ‘addictive’ reputation, but still enjoy the same content when they see it on other platforms. Remember to take your content to wherever you think the audience will engage with it.
But also, be aware of your audience across all your platforms and understand what will work where. Our Facebook has a large following of parents, so TikTok content about days out or places to go usually perform well, but our comedic videos probably wouldn’t land with that audience as well but would perform better on Twitter.
Overall, finding your niche is how you find your audience. TikTok can be daunting, and in an ever-developing digital communications world we’ll never be experts, but we’ve found a place where we have established a local audience who interact with our content. Try working strategically, have fun, be creative and the audience will come along with it!
Lauren Surtees is digital communications officer at Doncaster Council.
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