Billy Gleeson is the Partnerships Manager at Amplify. In this piece, he explains how campaigns on TikTok are changing the game in social media marketing.
Whether you love it or hate it, reporting is one of the most important and insightful components of any marketing campaign.
It’s usually a fairly standard narrative: one week, two weeks (or maybe a month for a bigger campaign) after content is live, you pull the data, populate the report, analyse the results, and close the campaign.
Sounds easy.
But in the uncharted and emerging world of TikTok, it’s a different story.
For the past year at Amplify, my team and I have been managing talent-led TikTok campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands – NBCUniversal, Canva, Amazon and Menulog to name a few.
And it’s the longevity of these campaigns on TikTok that is setting the platform apart.
Take our #CanvaVideo campaign, which featured 14 creators promoting Canva’s suite of video templates and editing features in the USA and Brazil.
One week after the content was live, we had organically reached almost two million creators on the platform and engaged 350K.
Pretty solid results.
But one week later, 14 days from the live date, our organic reach had nearly doubled to 3.5 million, and so had our engagement and Canva’s TikTok following.
This is when Amplify reported the success of the campaign to our client Canva.
However, more than six weeks down the track, the campaign has now reached just shy of 5 million, engaged over 700K, and Canva’s following has tripled on the platform.
This elongating of campaign life is a trend that just isn’t seen on the Instagrams and Facebooks of the world.
And here’s why.
Unlike other social media platforms, TikTok is focused less on when content is posted, and more on how popular it is with users.
That means, unlike Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, where the user experience is dictated by your friends, those you follow, or pages you like, the second you enter TikTok, your eyes are on viral content.
And this means that posts being produced by popular TikTok influencers are likely to be served to audiences weeks and weeks after first being posted. But there’s another factor at play too, and that’s User-Generated Content (UGC).
Take Amplify’s Menulog campaign, where creators including the Rybka Twins and Jamie Zhu encouraged users to submit their #DeliveryDance video on the platform.
The TikTok ‘sound’ has now seen more than 1900 pieces of content posted by fans, a trend that lengthens the lifetime and reach of a campaign dramatically.
And while not every campaign generates this level of audience involvement, when it’s done right and with the right talent, TikTok really can be the gift that just keeps on giving.
