As the recent debate around the pressure on artists to go viral on TikTok shows, the short-form video platform remains one of the most important tools in artist marketing. However, as always, strategy is key and music marketers have a growing number of tools available to refine their artist’s TikTok strategy. This week, we’re walking you through a host of free tools you can utilise.
TikTok Creative Center
Given TikTok’s removal of the Discover Tab, its Creative Center is exactly what music marketers need – and more. It’s split into four categories: Trend Intelligence, Campaign Inspiration, Creative Tools and Audio Library.
At the centre of the platform is TikTok’s Trend Intelligence, where you can find trending hashtags, songs, creators and videos. What’s really useful is that you are able to look into these on a country-by-country basis – whereas previously your in-app Trending tab would have been localised. You’ll be able to see the Top 100 Hashtags in a country, and even filter down by industry and timeframe: yesterday, last 30 days, last 120 days.
Hashtags and songs
You can also filter by hashtags that are new to the Top 100, to find the freshest ones and jump on them before they’re saturated. From the list, you can click into analytics for each hashtag, which will provide you with an interest over time graph, info on how long it’s been popular, at what percentage of its peak viewership it currently stands and whether it’s likely to trend within the next 7 days. This allows you to evaluate whether or not it’s still worthwhile incorporating it into your artist’s content strategy.
Furthermore, you’ll find a link to related videos using a hashtag, insights into the age range of the audience as well as their related interests, the top regions for the hashtag, related hashtags, and trending creators who are also using it. In this way, you’ll be able to be much more strategic with your artist’s usage of any given hashtag. Song insights work in a similar fashion, providing a list of the Top 100 songs on TikTok in a given country. Bear in mind that this does not include user-generated sounds. In order to find these, we recommend the apps TrendTok or vidIQ for TikTok (more on the latter below).
You’re further able to filter by the Top 100 ‘Popular’ songs and the top ‘Breakout’ songs – which are songs that “are growing at a significant rate”. Again, scooping out songs that are growing massively, rather than those that are popular but on decline, will help you ride the trend wave.
Creators, trends and ads
The Creators tab allows you to find trending creators, where you’re able to define the country of the creator or their audience, and a follower range, starting from the 10k+ mark. You’ll be able to filter results by followers, engagement or popularity. You can watch some highlighted videos, click through to their profile on TikTok, or you can connect with them via TikTok Creator Marketplace – which is where you can find advanced analytics into their profile, and enter into influencer marketing partnerships with them.
Finally, the Trending Videos tab shows you trending videos in the last 7 or last 30 day, which you can sort by ‘hot’, likes, comments or shares. A useful feature to stay abreast of overall trends and viral videos on TikTok.
Jumping into Campaign Inspiration, you can navigate to a Top Ads dashboard. Filter by country, and industry (we recommend the subcategory ‘Culture & Art’ under the umbrella category ‘News & Entertainment’). You can also filter by campaign objective, but equally you’ll be able to see each ad’s campaign objective under the results. You’ll then be able to filter the results by Reach, CTR, and Video Views – depending on what your most important metric would be.
By clicking into one of the top performing ads, you’ll find metrics such as duration of the ad, likes, comments, shares – and a graph indicating at which moment in the video most people clicked through to the traffic destination. This will give you a good grasp of what other artist teams are doing with TikTok Ads, and which assets and objectives drive good results. The Showcases section gives more details on different case studies on a per-industry basis.
Creative Insights section shows some key learnings for creating high-performing ads, such as “videos with a duration of between 2 to 34 seconds indicate a 280% lift in conversion and a 2% lift in impression”. Under the Quicktock tab, the TikTok team aims to educate marketers around topics like communities on TikTok, seasonal moments, vertical audiences, trends and creativity in the form of a bi-weekly short article.
The two other tabs – Creative Tools and Audio Library – seem more suitable to brands wanting to advertise on TikTok, but especially the Creative Tools section could be used by music marketers too to create ad assets for TikTok.
Together, these are all valuable insights – especially if you feel overwhelmed by the breath of content and communities living on TikTok.
vidIQ for TikTok
vidIQ has been one of Music Ally’s favourite free marketing tools for a long time, especially in the context of optimising artist YouTube channels. That’s why we were happy to hear the company has launched a new app called vidIQ for TikTok. In the app, you can find ‘Top tracks by location’ (including user-generated sounds) and ‘Top tracks by topic’ (where you can choose ‘Music’ as well as other categories). Another section includes ‘Top tracks by duration’, making it easier to find trending sounds for existing videos you’d like to publish. At the moment, the app is free to use, and users can customise their location and content category – and enable notifications to get notified as soon as a relevant sound starts trending.
This is to help you hop on the next trends before they take off, and without needing to check trending sounds manually all the time. If you have vidIQ’s Chrome extension installed, you can also log into TikTok on desktop and get some account-level insights such as a quick overview of Views, Likes, Comments, Shares and Engagement Rate per video on any account.
So if you’re a music marketer, you can check your artist’s account on a weekly basis, and pull some quick stats into which videos were the most engaging ones, and which ones didn’t work that well. Obviously, you can also do this with other artist’s profiles to learn what has been working for them and get inspired for your on-going strategy.
TikBuddy
Another free Chrome extension that can complement these insights is offered by TikBuddy. Here, you get additional stats such as how the video views compare against average views on the profile in the last 30 days, fans and likes growth/decline trend, the percentage of fans who have watched the video, like rate per views and more. TikBuddy also offers more comprehensive analytics in a full dashboard, however it’s pretty costly. We will provide recommendations into paid-for, advanced TikTok analytics dashboards in an upcoming Tools issue.
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