How to Get More Followers on TikTok: A Complete Guide

Over the last four years, TikTok has gone from strength to strength. In fact, it’s the fastest-growing social media platform in the world. It’s achieved more than 800 million active users monthly in those four years, which is no easy feat!

Nowadays, every influencer wants to get in on the action. But TikTok isn’t quite like any other platform. Gaining followers here is hard work.

This is why we’ve put together our complete guide on how to get more followers on TikTok.

How to Get More Followers on TikTok

We touched upon this in the introduction, but it can’t be overstated. You can’t photoshop your way to success on TikTok like you can on Instagram. Running ads, like on Facebook, likely won’t see you gain much in the way of following, either.

This is because TikTok is obsessed with virality.

By this we mean the content that performs best on TikTok is viral content. The actual subject of the content varies, but it most often revolves around trends or challenges.

Trends begin with one account. A hashtag is selected and other users mimic the content and spread the hashtag. Before you know it, the content is all over TikTok.

For example, a popular trend currently is the “Tell Me Without Telling Me” challenge. Users ask other users to share personal circumstances, opinions, and more, without directly stating it. This challenge alone currently has more than a billion views spread across the many videos created tagging it.

All this is to say, to gain followers and do well on TikTok, you need to think about your content, so that’s where we’ll start.

Figure Out Your Audience

Before you even begin creating content, ask yourself who is your content for?

There is no formula to viral content, no matter what a digital marketing agency tells you. The reason content goes viral on TikTok is because it resonates with people. It gets a lot of TikTok likes, trends and more people see it.

Creating great content, therefore, starts by understanding who that content is for.

Figuring out what audience you want is pretty simple. If you plan on monetizing your TikTok account in the future, your content should be closely related to this. For example, if you’re a musician, your content should be music-related and you want people interested in music to follow you.

Look at what competitors or other influencers are doing who are in your niche. Find their most popular content and figure out what it was that people loved so much. Was it funny, catchy, shocking, or something else entirely?

You should also be aware some audiences aren’t on TikTok. A massive 60% of TikTok users are Gen Z, so aged 24 and under. The majority of the rest are millennials, aged 24 to 34, with a tiny percentage of generations older than this.

This means if your product or brand is targeted at older millennials, generation x, or generation y, you’re unlikely to find them on TikTok. Though adult usage is increasing on the platform, other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram will serve you better.

Create and Jump on Trends

Now you know your audience and what content they love, you can start following the right accounts. This will tailor your ‘For You’ page and you can stay up to date with trends.

To create the best-performing content for trends, you need to act fast. Companies in particular sometimes struggle to do this, taking weeks to create content. By the time they’ve done it, the trend is dead.

Participating in trends as early as possible puts the most eyes on your videos. This gives you the best chance of increasing your followers.

If you’re really lucky, your video will go viral. Just one viral video can see a user gain thousands of followers.

You can also create a trend. The most popular trends are challenges, dances, or humor-based. Harmless pranks also do quite well on the app

You should be original and creative with new content. Don’t just put a spin on something someone else has done already.

This said, using trending songs on TikTok can help increase the chances of your video being seen. So it’s fine to come up with new ideas to match trending songs.

You’ll need to give your hashtags a lot of thought, too. Hashtags serve the same purpose on TikTok as any other social media. They help increase your video’s visibility.

There are general hashtags like #ForYou, as well as more specific hashtags for certain niches. Do your research and use the most specific ones for the best results. The general hashtags are often too saturated with content for videos to perform well.

Make sure to post your content at the right time. This is whenever your audience is most active. There isn’t a set rule to this. For the best results, you should experiment with different times and keep track of when your engagement is at its highest.

Cross-Promote Content

Though TikTok is unique, it doesn’t exist stranded from other social media platforms. Quite the opposite in fact. TikTok content performs really well on Reddit and Instagram in particular, but it also does well on Twitter and Facebook.

Part of this is, again, matching the content to the platform. For example, dance trends are unlikely to perform well for Reddit’s predominantly male and highly sarcastic user base. But self-deprecating or American political content does very well.

Figure out which platforms your content best matches up to. You can then drive traffic to your TikTok account, encouraging these followers to find you there.

Collaborate with Others

One of the best ways to get followers for TikTok is through collaborations or collabs. Find accounts with a decent following and create content with them. This helps you reach their already large audience.

If they like your content, they may head to your account and follow you as well.

Influence Away

Now you know how to get more followers on TikTok. Know your audience, create original content, jump on trends, and collaborate. Any of these strategies can help you gain a great following and increase your chance of creating viral content.

We’ve got lots more helpful how-to articles on our blog, so be sure to take a look.