How To Grow On TikTok: Views, Followers, and Engagement

Generating video views is the easiest goal on TikTok. Converting views into growth is another story. As an interest-centered platform, TikTok offers growth opportunities to those who know how to target their audience based on interests. Knowing how to grow on TikTok involves learning everything about your target audience and producing content that aligns with their preferences.

How To Grow Followers on TikTok

On TikTok, followers don’t always go where the majority goes. They go where their interests lead them. And TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is their compass. If you want to know how to grow followers on TikTok, you need to make this compass point users in your direction. Follow these best practices to kickstart your TikTok journey and experience sustained growth.

Find Your Voice and Produce Original and Authentic Content

Copying a wildly popular creator on other platforms may get you the attention you want. This strategy will not give you the same results on TikTok. TikTok offers creators a place to grow as their authentic selves. Find your unique voice, produce original content authentically representing your brand, and “your people” will find you.

Who are “your people,” and why are they important to your growth? Your people are those who will genuinely appreciate who you are and what you offer. Reaching them gets you active TikTok followers instantly.

The shortest way from point A to point B is a straight line. Your content represents point A, and your target audience is point B; the straight line is the For You feed. TikTok will recommend your video to users if it determines that your content matches the users’ preferences. As long as you publish content that satisfies your audience’s interests, you’ll reach the right people and convert their views into follows and engagement.

Don’t focus on increasing your TikTok follower count just to increase your numbers. Your priority should be getting followers who are right for your community. Create content to attract your niche audience so that TikTok consistently delivers views that count toward active growth.

Find Out What Works Best for Your Niche

Even with the right audience, you need to determine what content types give them the most value. Determine what works best for your niche community by looking at how well or poorly they relate to your videos.

Your analytics is the best tool in your TikTok toolkit to help you identify and understand trends in your performance. Which videos get the most views? Do they also receive the highest engagement? Do some posting times give better results than others? Are there certain types of content that generate more likes and comments? Find a pattern that gives you the most desirable results, replicate it, and stick to it as long as it works for you.

Keep in mind that having high engagement boosts your visibility on feeds. And high visibility almost always translates into continued follower growth.

Learn from the Success of Others in Your Niche

Visit the profiles of creators in your niche and those in other niches who also share your audience. Ideally, choose creators who are already successful and have a big following. Analyze their most popular videos. What do they have in common? What are their fans saying? Is there a common sentiment among their followers based on their comments?

Get a better understanding of what your target audience is looking for on TikTok. You can do this by closely examining the kinds of content they engage with. Then, perform a comparative analysis against your content. If you have similar content that doesn’t perform as well as the competition’s, try to find the cause.

Why are they getting more views and engagement? Are you posting at a different time? Perhaps you’re not reaching your audience when they’re online. Check their video description. Perhaps your TikTok SEO strategy is not effective enough. You may simply need to modify your posting schedule, optimize your hashtag combination, or select trending music or original sounds.

Is your video style not resonating well with viewers and not converting views into followers and engagement? Take a page from another creator’s book to improve your video ideas. Don’t copy another creator’s content outright. Just use it for inspiration.

Remember that your authenticity is just as important as the quality and relevance of your material. Don’t compromise your voice to please a wider audience. This strategy will not work on TikTok. Keep your focus on your niche community’s content consumption preferences. The followers will follow even as you enhance your content strategy.

Reap the Rewards of User-Generate Content

User-generated content is one of the simplest but most effective ways to magnify your voice and reach more people. TikTok offers a number of tools that help creators encourage UGC and gain higher visibility for sustained follower growth.

• Enable Duet and Stitch for your top-performing videos. You can enable these features for all your videos. But you can re-purpose your top-performing content and invite users to use it to create Duet or Stitch videos. Alternatively, you can recreate your top-performing videos with a clear CTA inviting everyone to Duet or Stitch with you. 

• Leverage trends. You can trace most trends and viral videos these days back to TikTok. Whether it’s a trending song, challenge, reaction video, or voice effect, it can stimulate active participation among your viewers. If you’re able to start a trend within your community, you’ll successfully generate tons of UGC and give your profile high visibility. 

• Ask for feedback. Use the poll or Q&A sticker to ask viewers for feedback on your video or a topic relevant to your niche. Encourage them to deliver their responses via video. Let them know you’ll feature some of their replies on your page. 
• Prioritize TikTok SEO. More and more people use TikTok not just to watch entertaining videos or to keep up with their favorite brands and creators. Many users utilize TikTok as a search and discovery tool. Develop a good TikTok SEO strategy to rank high on For You feeds and search results. Use the right keywords and most relevant hashtags to help people discover your profile and content more easily. People who discover you via a TikTok search are looking for exactly the kind of content you offer. And they’re practically guaranteed to become followers.

How To Grow Viewers on TikTok: Find the Best Times To Reach Your Audience

Whatever your video content is about, there’s an audience for it on TikTok. TikTok’s For You recommendation algorithm will deliver your content to them. You can increase your view count to increase your chances of gaining more followers and engagement. Posting at the right times is one strategy for how to grow viewers on TikTok.

What’s the “right time” to post on TikTok? This is when your target audience is most active on the platform. With the right signals, the algorithm will deliver your content to your target audience’s For You feed.

However, it may get lost among other video recommendations if you don’t post at the right time. When your posting schedule coincides with your audience’s browsing schedule, they’re more likely to see your video on their feeds.

The best times to post on TikTok depend on a variety of factors, such as your location and your audience demographic. You need to publish content when they’re online — not when you have time to post. After you’ve published a sufficient number of videos, you’ll be able to identify the specific times when your videos reached the most viewers.

While collecting performance data for your analytics, you can follow this overall best time to post on TikTok. The ideal hours to post for each day of the week shown below are the result of an experiment involving 30K TikTok posts.

Use this schedule as a starting point. Recalibrate it as you gather performance insights over time until you achieve the highest view counts possible. All times listed below are in Pacific Standard Time.

• Monday: 10 PM
• Tuesday: From 6 AM, peaking at 9 AM
• Wednesday: 7 AM
• Thursday: 7 PM 
• Friday: 12 noon onward, peaking at 3 PM
• Saturday: 11 AM
• Sunday: 7 to 8 AM and 4 PM

How Often Should I Post on TikTok To Grow?

How many times and when you post on TikTok determines your number of views and level of engagement. However, posting too many times within a day can negatively impact your reach. So, you may ask, “How often should I post on TikTok to grow?” What’s the magic number?

Determining the best posting schedule goes hand in hand with your ideal posting frequency. Your posting schedule needs to be in perfect sync with your target audience’s TikTok browsing schedule. So, how many times they’re active on TikTok within a day determines how often you should post.

Your TikTok analytics has specific sections where you’ll find pertinent details about your audience’s reach vis-a-vis your content performance. Within the Overview tab, you’ll see your video views and engagement for a selected date range. The Engagement section under Overview will give you more detailed engagement insights for the selected date range.

You’ll see where your viewers found your videos within the Content tab. The Followers tab will show you where your audiences are from and the times of the day or week when your followers are most active on TikTok.

The more videos you post, the more accurate your analytics. But what if you don’t have historical data to use yet? Where should you start?

If you’re still building your audience, you can follow TikTok’s recommendation of posting one to four times a day. To better understand when to schedule your posts, check out other creators and brands in your niche.

Find their best-performing videos for each day and take note of the times the creators posted them. See if the view and engagement results are consistent across several weeks. Follow the same schedule for some of your posts, but you should also have a “control group” to compare against.

How To Grow On TikTok 2023: Please Your Audience and the Algorithm

TikTok content reaches users based on their interests. The algorithm recommends content to a user when it determines that the user may be interested in it. So, understanding what your target audience likes on TikTok is the first step to connecting with them.

To understand how to grow on TikTok in 2023, you need to remember the content rules on the platform. In contrast, profile popularity has the biggest influence on reach and growth on other platforms. Create videos that please your audience’s preferences and optimize them for the For You algorithm, and the popularity will follow.

Keep in mind, however, that your popularity on the platform will not sustain your growth. Consistently producing content relevant to your niche and community will.

Keep your audience’s interests, values, and passions in mind when developing your content strategy. Actively listen to their needs and deliver content that meets these needs. Reaching viewers for whom your content has value is the surest way to convert your reach into active growth.

This is especially important when building your fan base from zero. Teach the algorithm how to identify the right viewers for your videos through proper optimization from the get-go. Enhance the algorithm’s accuracy as you enhance your content strategy based on your continued understanding of your audience’s needs.

Apply the best practices that suit your purposes for how to grow on TikTok. And double your audience-targeting advantage by leveraging Hig Social’s advanced, proprietary AI technology. Sign up for a High Social plan to ensure you deliver your videos to genuinely interested users. Start growing your TikTok today!

TikTok Growth