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Are you wondering how to promote your music and grow your audience on TikTok, this is the guide to help improve your TikTok music promotion and take your music viral.
TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social apps and MUSIC is what drives the platform. Over half a billion active users around the world share their favorite songs on TikTok through dance challenges, lip-syncs, or by simply putting the track in the background of a funny skit, how-to-video, or emotional moments caught on camera.
Not only is TikTok a great platform for music promotion, sharing songs, and reaching more people, but music promotion has also been shown to lead to a huge boost in streaming on other platforms like Spotify and YouTube.
How TikTok Algorithm Works For TikTok Music Promotion
The TikTok algorithm is a batch-release quality-scoring system. It uses machine learning to evaluate the quality of every video uploaded. When you upload a video, it shows it to a small number of its users in between popular videos.
Depending on likes, comments, shares, downloads, and watch time, it will assign a score and then release the video to a larger audience. To trigger the algorithm to show your video to a larger audience, it takes a ratio of about 1 likes every 10 views.
This continues until your video reaches its ‘score cap’. A video going viral depends on how the first batch of the audience enjoys it. This is why you can repost the same video a day later and have an entirely different result. If a video fails, wait and repost it later.
I’m going to be sharing some tips to you get the best out of TikTok for your music;
Release Your Music On TikTok
You can get your music on TikTok in one of two ways;
- You can release your music on TikTok and have it amongst its music library by going through a distributor. These distributors are responsible for getting your music out there especially on online music platforms like Vevo and TikTok is no exception here. Distribution companies like TuneCore and DittoMusic offer music distribution to TikTok.
- You can deliver your music in short-form videos for usage on the platform. Upload a video with the clip of the track that you want to use. To do this, click the profile photo in the bottom right corner, name your sound, you should go with “the name of the track – artist’s name” so it is easy for others to find.
Your Music Should Be TikTok Friendly
For an effective TikTok music promotion, your songs need to be TikTok friendly.
Not all styles of music thrive on TikTok. The songs you release on TikTok do not necessarily have to be new songs, but they should be TikTok friendly. The songs need to be, memorable, relatable, broad, catchy, and they should give users something to create content around, lip-sync to or develop a challenge for.
Furthermore, TikTok runs on 60-seconds videos no more than that, so you need to find the perfect 60 seconds hook from your music that you would be releasing on the platform. If you have a hook that you feel users can dance along with then you should make a video showing it off.
Utilize Trending And Niche Hashtags
Using hashtags help you target a specific audience. This is a great method to promote your music using Music Niche Marketing. Hashtags help to target your TikTok music promotion to a particular niche.
Just like Instagram and Twitter, TikTok runs a hashtag game but is not as extensive. The best hashtags you should use are trending hashtags. There are always new trends on TikTok, finding these hashtags wouldn’t be an issue, you simply have to go to the discover page of the TikTok app.
Depending on the kind of content you are creating, searching some trending hashtags to identify who the most popular influencers are and what overall vibe is rocking right now might help you find your niche and build your community.
Collaborate With Influencers
Like other social media platforms, there are a lot of influencers too. Getting placements on influencers’ profiles is effective for your TikTok music promotion as this is still relatively cheap because it is not yet so common so this is would be a strategic way to build engagement around a track, creating the first wave of viral growth.
Artists are now using collaborations to immediately promote their new music to millions of followers. In choosing the influencer for your music, you should always make sure there is a connection between you, your music, the influencer, and the concept as relevance is more important than reach.
There is a lot of nice content that these influencers can create using your music, like a lip-sync to it, a duet with you and the influencer, making dance videos. They are good at this and already know the type of content that resonates with their audience and will yield the best results for you.
Collaborate With Other Artists
TikTok allows collaborations between two or more artists to aid them in achieving their goal to have a successful TikTok music campaign. You can make a new collaborative video or create a new song with added harmonies and instruments.
Meeting up with other artists in your niche and just working on a fun video piece where you guys work on songs would be great, you create engagement with each other’s fan base thus boosting reach.
Create Contests And Challenges
You can create contests and challenges around a song as a way to promote that song. This is also a very effective method in creating a successful TikTok music promotion campaign. To get a lot of users on this, you might have to offer some kind of reward or incentive to the grand winner or just the participants in general.
The reward should be really attention-grabbing, doesn’t have to be so much, could be something very simple and fun like free concert tickets or VIP experiences. This way, the attention of users is dragged in.
When running campaigns, you should be very specific in what you’d like your audience to do, that is, the kind of content you want them to create, for instance, a dance challenge or a comedy skit challenge.
Remember to keep it fun and engaging, it should also be something that a lot of people can easily do, you don’t want to give a hard examination to your fans then it reaches a point where most of them give up.
Challenges tend to go viral when they are fun and can be interpreted in different ways by different people, so you should give them the chance to be creative in their ideas.
To get the challenge rolling, you can collaborate with other artists to make and post their own videos completing the challenge and tagging the branded hashtag you have created for this challenge. This would speed-boost the challenge going viral.
Cross-Promote Your TikTok Videos
Cross-promoting your TikTok across other social media platforms is a good way to reach people with your content. Encourage your followers on other platforms to connect with you on TikTok as this will help them discover your TikTok music promo.
Inform them about upcoming and ongoing challenges and contests. Be very specific with your call to action and do not take out the watermark on your TikTok videos as this will help your followers easily find you using your handle.
TikTok Analytics
Like other social media platforms, you should pay attention to your marketing efforts and also the success of your influencer marketing strategy.
TikTok provides its “Pro” account users with inbuilt analytic tools. These analytics tell you how well the contents you’ve posted have performed over the past 7 and 28days. It also lets you know which of your videos have trended the most during this period.
It allows you to analyze your TikTok account, track trends and monitor hashtags. To switch to a pro account, go to manage account, then click switch account, select your industry, and then TikTok will load with the analytics session.
Apart from the TikTok pro account, there are other tools that let you track your metrics and also how well your influencer placements are coming along. Tools like www.socialinsider.io www.analisa.io and so much more.
