TikTok Business Account—Why You Should Use It

Dec 12, 2023
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The Main Perks of Using a TikTok Business Account

Many people still view TikTok as a platform where teenagers do silly dances and post 15-second responses to challenges. Businesses across the world disregard this platform, ignoring its vast potential for tapping into a new audience.If you’re still unsure if you should create a TikTok Business Account, these stats by Influencer Marketing Hub might persuade you to do so:

  • TikTok has 1 billion active monthly users
  • 167 million videos are viewed every minute
  • It has the best engagement rates per post of all social media—even micro-influencers (up to 50,000 followers) reach engagement rates of up to 17.96%

Using TikTok for your business can be an amazing way to grow a brand, yet it’s still underrated. Many companies neglect TikTok marketing, and those that dabble are not aware of the full power of the TikTok Business Account.The questions abound—What is a Business Account on TikTok, and how can you set it up? Why should you use it instead of a regular account? How can it help you be more efficient? Here are the answers!

TikTok Business Account vs. Personal Account

Source: Hello I’m NikAt the moment, TikTok users have two options to choose from when it comes to their account type—personal accounts (that now incorporate tools for creators) and business accounts.Even though personal accounts now have access to many useful features for professional social media management and better content production, the Business Account offers several options that are crucial for marketing managers in their efforts to build a fanbase and make money on TikTok. These options include:

  • Running paid ad campaigns
  • Using advanced analytical tools
  • Scheduling posts up to ten days in advance
  • Tracking performance in real-time
  • Accessing TikTok’s Creator Marketplace to engage in influencer marketing
  • Using the Commercial Music Library that lists only royalty-free tracks
  • Adding call-to-action buttons
  • Accessing the Business Creative Hub where you can find content ideas and see how other businesses are doing

What Is a Pro Account?

If you encounter the term Pro Account while learning about how your brand can benefit from building a better TikTok presence, don’t be confused by it. Several app updates ago, when signing up for TikTok, you’d get a personal account that allowed you to post videos without any analytical insight into their performance.If you wanted to use analytics and other tools for creators, you had to switch to a Pro Account. As more time passed, the Pro Account option effectively became the Creator Account, but users who wanted more out of their app could still see the CTA Switch to Pro Account in the settings before choosing Creator or Business. Confusing, right?By the end of 2021, TikTok removed any mentions of Pro Accounts from the app to avoid the confusion. When you sign up now, you get a personal account that has all the benefits of a Pro or Creator Account that no longer exists. From there, you can switch to a Business Account that has additional features created to assist professional marketers.

How To Set Up a Business Account on TikTok

Setting up your Business Account doesn't consist of any additional verification processes. All you need to do is:

  1. Open TikTok
  2. Visit your profile
  3. Go to Settings and privacy by tapping the three parallel lines in the top-right corner
  4. Tap Manage account
  5. Tap Switch to Business Account
  6. Select a category that best fits your company and hit Next

You won’t see any noticeable changes at first. The only visible difference lies in having access to the Business suite section in the Settings and privacy tab.You can switch between two available account types constantly with no charges or additional requirements.

Top Benefits of a TikTok Business Account

If you’re on TikTok to grow your brand—whether your goal is generating new leads or becoming famous on the platform—you’ll want to use the Business Account. It allows you to exploit the full potential of this fast-growing social media platform by making it easier to spread brand awareness and generate reports on your campaign success.The Business Account comes with many nifty perks.For instance, while regular users can use any song in the world in their videos, companies have to worry about copyright issues. TikTok has created the Commercial Music Library that features over 500,000 royalty-free tracks so that you don’t have to worry about Creative Commons and possible lawsuits.Another helpful feature is trend recommendations related to your niche. For example, if you’re in the electronics industry, TikTok will recommend electronics-related content so you can find out what topics trend or which hashtags and video formats (3-minute videos or shorter) are used more often.This way, you’ll know what to upload and what to do to make your content go viral among the right audiences.

Source: Carlos Muza

TikTok for Business—Account Analytics

While you can get access to analytics from a default personal account, this feature is rarely used by the majority of users who don’t have ambitions to join the Creator Fund or seek sponsorships.Account analytics are there mainly for business users and influencers to see how well their content is performing on TikTok and to see how they can improve.Before you go to the Analytics section of your account, you can find useful data on your profile or the Discovery page, such as:

  • Total number of likes
  • The number of followers
  • Hashtag views—the total number of views on videos with a specific hashtag
  • Engagement rates—although not available as a separate metric, you can calculate it using the formula ((Number of comments + number of likes + number of shares) / number of views) * 100

These metrics can give you a basic idea of what type of TikTok content to make and what you need to change in your TikTok strategy.

Analytics Page

When you open the specialized Analytics section in a Business Account, you’ll see much more data divided into four sections, as follows:SectionAnalyticsOverview

  • Video views
  • Profile views
  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Shares

Content

  • Video posts (all videos)
  • Trending videos (top-performing ones)

Followers

  • Total followers
  • New followers
  • Growth rate
  • Gender
  • Top territories
  • Follower activity (when they are most active)

LIVE

  • Number of live videos
  • Unique viewers
  • Diamonds (TikTok currency users can send during a livestream)

You can access your analytics within the app or in a browser. With this information, you’ll be able to create actionable insights for your TikTok campaign. For instance, you’ll be able to learn about the demographic of your followers and the times when they are active the most, allowing you to know when to schedule your posts for the best engagement rates.The data on your videos shows in more detail what posts performed the best, which should then tell you what type of content you should continue producing and whether that lip-sync challenge was a hit or miss.

Advertising

Having a Business Account allows you to create paid ads to reach users who don’t follow you or who don’t see your content on their For You page. To create ad campaigns, you’ll need an Ad account that requires verification.Once you finish signing up, you can use TikTok’s Ad Manager dashboard, which is similar to other social media management tools. You will have to set a budget for your campaign and one of the following objectives:

  1. Awareness, i.e., reach
  2. Consideration, which can mean traffic, video views, app installs, or lead generation
  3. Conversion, for encouraging viewers to complete a purchase on your website or sign up for your newsletter, for instance

Then, you can select ad groups and specify details, such as their placement and target audience.

Types of Ads

The success of TikTok advertising lies in recognizing what type of ad works best with your target audience. There are five main types of ads you can use on TikTok:

  • Top view—It’s a 15-second video that shows up on the users’ screen three seconds after they open up the app as the first video in their feed. It’s great for reach and engagement
  • Brand takeover—This is an aggressive marketing ad used for brand awareness. Your 5-second video will show up on the screen when the users open the app
  • In-feed ad—These 15-second videos show up between other recommended videos as users scroll on the For You page. It’s a helpful tool to boost the traffic towards your TikTok account or an external landing page
  • Branded effects—This option allows you to create effects (such as stickers, 3D, 2D, or AR effects) that users can add to their videos and promote your brand
  • Hashtag challenges—You can promote your hashtag on the Discovery page and incite TikTokers to create content adding your hashtag to their captions

The last two ad types can be immensely powerful if you use them correctly. If your hashtag challenge becomes a trend, it will reach thousands or millions of users, and you won’t be the one that creates the content anymore. An example of a successful hashtag challenge is #GuacDance, which Chipotle used to reach over 1.1 billion views thanks to influencers and other TikTokers posting their guacamole-inspired dances.

Influencer Marketing

Source: Artem PodrezInfluencer marketing is a major element of TikTok marketing and one of the most popular and most successful ways to promote your company on the platform. Instead of creating ads that pop up in your audience’s feed, you can get in touch with influencers and pay for a sponsored post.You can agree on the messaging of the post and rely on your influencer’s creativity to deliver something their fans will engage with.While you can do this on other social media channels as well, TikTok has a different algorithm and the For You page, which means that influencers’ videos can reach a lot of people who don’t follow neither them nor your brand on TikTok.If you want to build a fanbase, you should opt for a creator with fewer followers but with great influence in your industry. If you’re looking for brand awareness, you can go for a famous TikToker, but their posts come with a hefty price:TierPrice per PostNano-influencer (1–10,000 followers)$5–$25Micro-influencer (10,000–50,000 followers)$25–$125Mid-tier influencer (50,000–500,000 followers)$125–$1,250Macro-influencer (500,000–1,000,000 followers)$1,250–$2,500Mega-influencer (more than 1,000,000 followers)$2,500+If you want to get your name to as many people as possible and have the budget to do it, you can always contact the big TikTok stars, such as Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae Easterling, but be prepared to pay a lot.While the prices may seem steep, using this approach does pay off—businesses average a gain of $5.20 for every $1 they invest in influencer marketing.

Finding the Influencers

In case you’re struggling to find an influencer that would best fit your company’s and your marketing campaign’s needs, you can use the Discovery page by searching for specific keywords and finding influencers manually.For a more refined search, you can use various influencer search tools, including TikTok’s Creator Marketplace. Creator Marketplace allows you to filter your search and find influencers that have followers who would be interested in what your company has to offer.

Community Management

As with any other social media, communicating with your followers is an important aspect of a successful marketing campaign. On TikTok, you can share someone else’s video (especially if they use your hashtag or participate in your challenge), post replies to their video content, make a reaction video with the Duet feature, and so on.The Business Account also allows you to create unique auto-replies within the Message settings in the Business suite section. You can create two types of automated messages:

  1. Welcome message—This message is sent automatically to anyone who sends you a direct message for the first time
  2. Keyword auto-reply—You can create automated messaging for situations when users use specific keywords in their DMs

Auto-replies are a great feature for businesses because it allows you to reduce manual replying to each individual message, all the while your potential customers receive replies to their queries instantly.

Managing a TikTok Business Account Can Be Overwhelming—Kubbco Can Help

Source: Anna ShvetsManaging a social media marketing campaign is not a one-person job as you need to deal with so many various aspects of the process at the same time. As a marketing manager, you need to respond to users, create new posts, create ad campaigns, follow analytics, make changes—the list never stops.This is true for all social media, and TikTok makes everything even more difficult, thanks to its fast-paced nature.Trends and challenges on TikTok come and go in a flash, and you need a dedicated team ready to pounce. To succeed on TikTok, you must know how to spot a trend that suits your business goals and brand messaging and be ready to create a top-notch video quickly.You can dedicate a several-thousand-dollar budget to your TikTok campaign, but it will be of little use if you don’t have campaign specialists, content creators, video producers, designers, etc., ready to make new content and adapt their approach all the time.Kubbco has all of that and more.

What We Do

Kubbco is a social media agency that specializes in TikTok advertising and content. By reaching out to our team, you’ll get the help of an official TikTok advertising partner that will take over your business account and:

  1. Create a custom-made strategy that works for your brand and target audience
  2. Make paid ad groups that come with the best ROI
  3. Develop top-quality videos with our team of creators, designers, and video directors
  4. Monitor analytics and adapt constantly to optimize the performance
  5. Deliver the results and allow you to reach millions of users and generate thousands of leads

If you want to get insights into our work and advice from our experts, subscribe to our newsletter, and we’ll deliver new tips and tricks on how to conquer TikTok and other social media regularly to your inbox.

Join Matas, OLAPLEX, and NATURLI’ Foods—Let Us Propel Your TikTok Business Account to the Stars

All you need to do is have a goal—we’ll do the rest. Whether you seek brand awareness, more traffic to your website, or an increase in sales, we’ll come up with the best strategy for your company.We’ll build your account from the ground up if you’re just starting your TikTok presence, posting well-performing videos on a regular basis. Our team will keep track of how your target audience engages with each post and ad placement. We’ll also research influencers and reach out to those that are ideal for what you’re trying to achieve.Our results speak for themselves:

  • NATURLI’ Foods gained 5,200 new followers and 6.2 million new views, with 112 videos we created for them within 23 weeks
  • For Matas, we posted 25 videos, all of which reached above 10,000 views. Out of those 25, eight went viral and had more than 300,000 views
  • With OLAPLEX, it took us five weeks to reach 5.1 million views and gain 22,000 new followers. Two of our videos went over 1 million views, with the total number of interactions going over 224,000!

There’s nothing stopping you from enjoying the same success and getting your company’s name to be at the heart of the next TikTok craze. Contact us and tell us what you want your brand’s TikTok account to look like, and we’ll get on it in no time. You won’t even have to learn how to lip-sync.Featured image: Flo Dahm

Hawra Hashem
Marketing Manager

I create and execute effective communication strategies and content based on data-driven insights and creativity.

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