Why Should You Add TikTok To Your Marketing Plan And How It Benefits Your Podcast

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Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard and today I am bringing on a fabulous member of our team here at Pott A Ties. I am bringing on Whitney Lortson and you may have seen her before because she's been a guest on the show and she's brought us lots of really interesting social media content before. She is a part of our social media team. She heads it. And today we've asked her to talk about TikTok because we are hearing a lot of podcasters going on TikTok and doing things. So we've asked her to talk about that and she's come up with the topic, why should you add TikTok to your marketing plan and how it benefits your podcast? And I love that we're tying the two things together because we always want to have a plan for what we're doing and and we want to make sure that it's benefiting our show and our businesses at the same time. So, Whitney Lawrence, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. And I look forward to more of your social media topics as we go forward in the Future here on FeatureBrandt.

Thanks, Tracy. I am so excited to present on this today because this is one of my passions. So as it shows, we are going to talk about why add TikTok to your marketing plan and how it benefits your podcast. This is a question a lot of people tend to ask because they hear about TikTok. If you are not a millennial or Gen Z, you may not be using it yet, or you may be hearing about it and not sure if it's going to work for you. So that is the big aim today, to see if it will work for you. So what I'm going to cover is who I am. First of all, to give you some context, some stats on TikTok, we're going to address misconceptions and then get into the benefits along with some content, ideas, examples of things that could work, and some first steps for you. My aim is to help you think about ways to create promotional clips of your podcast without adding hours of work or stress to your life, which is another big obstacle a lot of people face with social media, especially when it comes to trying something new. A lot of people feel like social media is a waste of time, but I believe that TikTok is a great use of your time and a lot of people feel frustrated by social media algorithms because it can be really hard to get people's attention. However, that's one of the benefits of TikTok that we're going to go over it. So if you've been thinking that you don't have the time or energy to produce content in addition to your show, we're right there with you. Most podcasters feel this way, but TikTok may be an option for you that doesn't feel that overwhelming.

So first, for some context, as you heard from Tracy, I'm Whitney Lauritson. I am Potter Ties, a social media strategist. I direct the team. I also host a number of podcasts. My main podcast is called this Might Get Uncomfortable, which actually started out on potitize. In 2019, before I started working with Pottedize, I met Tracy. I was incredibly impressed with what she was doing over at Potatise and decided to use Potitize as my host and went through all the episode production. I've done it all with that show and, and that's actually what led me to working with Potted Ties as the social media strategist. And I've been using TikTok since 2019 as well. So actually right around the time that I launched the show, a few months before, I started experimenting with TikTok and absolutely fell in love with it. So my goal here today is to help you think about whether you're ready to use TikTok yourself, if you are not already using it, or maybe taking it to another level and really just explore this as a possible interest for you. So first, let's start off with a simplified overview of what TikTok is. We're going to get into the misconceptions, but beginning here, think about TikTok as a place to create authentic bite size video content, fast paced and bingeable. Much like the binge factor. As you're thinking about what makes your podcast bingeable, think about how can you make your video content bingeable? People refer to this as fun, snackable. People look at TikTok as very intimate and it's a phenomenal place for user created content, user generated content, which is a big focus in the marketing world these days. That means that you are creating the Content yourself versus a brand that would hire somebody to do it for them. Right? A lot of brands actually now hire People from TikTok because of their success there. So depending on your goals with your podcast, you could actually look at TikTok as another monetization stream, as another way to work with your sponsors. Tons of benefit there. But it all comes down to being authentic and making things bite sized. There are currently over 1 billion monthly active users on TikTok. This is a really impressive number. These people turn to TikTok to feel entertained, to find and share joy, to learn new things, and to create and celebrate important moments and movements. It is actually the fastest growing social media application of all time, according to some sources. And to really effectively utilize it, it's important to know these statistics and to know who's using it and why, how are people interacting with it, which we're going to get into more today. The average session length of TikTok according to some sources is just over 10 minutes, which is more than double that of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That's according to this platform called Statista. But other references resources have said an average user spends approximately 52 minutes a day. So sometimes the difference between a session length, in that case, maybe people go on TikTok five times a day for about 10 minutes each. For someone like me, it's a lot more. I could sit down and spend an hour on TikTok easily. I try not to, but I bet you my average usage is at least an hour a day because I really enjoy consuming content on there. Let's talk about some TikTok misconceptions. Number one is that people say it's just a dance app, when in fact TikTok content spans education, comedy, food, lifestyle, pet, sports, music, on and on. It's actually one of the major ways that the Gen Z generation uses social media to consume news. I'm actually not Gen Z, I'm a millennial and I would say that TikTok is one of my top sources of news too, because it is so timely, because it's so authentic. I found a lot of trustworthy people. There are a lot of news organizations on there. Washington Post is a phenomenal example that are presenting news in a really digestible way. So I'm not just there to watch somebody dance. If you feel like you're too old for it, that might be a misconception as well. It is a space where everybody, anybody can be exactly who they are and want to be who they want to be and feel loved for it. Truly, no matter what your background is, your upbringing, your race, your creed, your age, you can enter into this space and really find a great place for yourself. And truly, the age thing limits a lot of people, but I hope that it doesn't for you, because I've seen people up to age 100 on there and babies as well. They're actually not posting the content themselves, but they're on there every single age. And lastly, another big misconception is that you need special skills to understand it. Maybe it feels really confusing and overwhelming and I hope to help you move through that today. Videos of all styles perform really well on TikTok. Many different strategies work really well too. So it doesn't have to be done one way. You don't need any fancy equipment, you don't need to understand hashtags or music. You can keep it really simple. We're going to get into that later, later, but first let's talk about some benefits. The number one benefit in my opinion to TikTok is the algorithm. That's because it recommends content to viewers based on their watch and like history. So as you and as other people use TikTok, it's really getting to know you and it starts to show you videos based on your needs, on your patterns. And it does it in a way unlike other platforms. Yet imagine the other platforms like Facebook and Instagram are really working to integrate things like this. TikTok is measuring users interests based on all these interactions. And the longer somebody's watching types of videos, the more content of that type they'll show, the more you search for it. So it really gets to know people and shows them a variety of things in a topic category unlike any other platform. It just feels like it knows you. And I think this is why people are very drawn to it. Because of that algorithm, you can get incredible engagement over and over again. The stats above are an example of like in 60 days getting tons of video views, profile views, without doing a ton of work. It's also a phenomenal way to reach the main users, which Gen Zs and Millennials. I think about just under 50% of users are between 10 and 29 years old. So thinking about your audience, even if they're not that age, you still want to create content that kind of feeds into what they're interested in because then that boosts your video for all different people to see. So really understanding the algorithm, how it works to your advantage, is important for TikTok, but it doesn't take a lot of work. And to me that's why it's a big benefit. Secondly, as I mentioned before, it's generally quite easy to use. It has a lot of built in features. The platform itself has things that you can do with text on it, so you don't have to use a secondary editing tool. You can do it all within TikTok. It can take you literally just a few seconds to post. Generally really short videos perform well on TikTok, at least historically. That's kind of changing right now. But keeping that in mind, if you're going to just do a 15 second video, you could literally make your video from beginning to end within a few minutes and do that very easily on TikTok. TikTok actually rewards people who use their native features. So because it's easy to use, I would actually use the TikTok platform instead of something else. Because when you're doing things like visual effects and on screen text, TikTok notices that and that helps with the algorithm. It's also a platform that's always evolving and I added this into a benefit because you can learn a lot about social media by using TikTok. You can see what's trending. You can see the different formats for videos and tones that people are using. And I actually think using TikTok first in your video content is really beneficial. Even if you're still using Instagram and Facebook, which I would encourage you to do too, Pinterest. All these other platforms are evolving rapidly because of TikTok. So for you to spend a lot of time on TikTok, it helps you understand the whole landscape of social media, examples of how it's evolving. TikTok's learning from other platforms, so they just introduced Stories, which started on Snapchat, became very popular in Instagram. TikTok now has stories. They also just expanded their length to 10 minutes. Believe it or not, you can do up to a 10 minute long video on TikTok, and that's kind of taken from concepts like YouTube. So it's evolving alongside the other platforms. They're all kind of supporting one another. But generally these days the platforms are taking notes from TikTok and TikTok sometimes take some of their features as well, like the length and the story format. So it's just really a trendsetter for all of social media. And to me that's a huge benefit to using it. So let's talk about TikTok. For podcasters, really it comes down to experimenting to see how it benefits your show. It's not a matter of does it benefit your show it's figuring out which way is going to work best to drive listeners. And driving listeners can be from your podcast to TikTok and vice versa TikTok to your podcast. We're going to talk about that too. But thinking about how it complements it and doing both, can you get your podcast listeners to follow along your journey on TikTok as a starting point? And then as you build on TikTok, you'll start to drive TikTokers to your podcast as well. That comes to my biggest piece of advice. To do well on TikTok, you have to be on TikTok, and that starts with consuming content before you create it. So your very first step for exploring TikTok is to engage on there. Start by building your community. You could do this by liking commenting and sharing videos that other people are creating. There was a statistic from TikTok itself last year in 2021 that said that 21% of TikTokers feel a better connection with companies than that comment in other people's videos. And when you spend time on TikTok, you'll notice this. A lot of companies comment. So by you just going into TikTok, maybe today, creating an account if you don't have it yet, and just focus on commenting on other people's content, that's a really great way to start building a community where you talk about building trust. There are features on TikTok like duetting, stitching. If these are foreign words to you, don't worry about it. Virtually what those mean is that you are taking somebody else's content and building upon it. So in addition to commenting, a type of sharing on TikTok is taking something that somebody else has already done and adding your own spin on it, adding your commentary on it, just highlighting it as something that you enjoy. So really spending time to watch videos and understand the trends. I also highly recommend saving videos that you like as you're watching them so that you could use them later as reference points for modeling them, for duetting them and stitching them, for maybe coming back around to comment on them. Reading the comments section is really huge on TikTok. So really thinking right now, can you engage for the first time or can you engage more if you already have a TikTok account?

And I wanted to share three examples of accounts that you could follow today, right now, if you wanted to open up the app. Although I don't recommend multitasking, but maybe right afterwards, these three accounts, you can write them down. One is Drew. I might butcher her last name, but she's actually a client of Potiti's. I found her because I was reviewing her show description. She, I believe, just launched her podcast. I went into her TikTok account last night and and she has a clip from her podcast on her TikTok account and I'm going to share that as an example of content in a moment. So go follow Drew Ren. She has like 2 million followers on TikTok. You can see the type of content you've done and she's a great person to follow right now. So you can watch her evolution as she combines TikTok and podcasting together. In fact, the very first clip that I saw from her podcast is with another TikToker that I follow. So it's a great example of doing collaborations which you can add to your TikTok strategy in the future. Another example, I again don't know how to pronounce this man's name. Jello or Gello. Gello TV is his account. I really like his style as a podcaster. He's a great example of someone that's doing it kind of simultaneously, simply, but in a very clever way. So if you're looking for more ways to create podcast centered content, he's a really good example. And lastly, I wanted to shout out Alexandra Hazard, who's part of our team here. She does such a cool job. She's really up to date on trend. So if you're looking for someone who's down to earth approachable, somebody that you might already know, please follow Alexandra. I just love watching her videos. She knows TikTok. You can tell she is using it in fun ways, but it also looks pretty effortless. I don't know if it is, but. But she's a really great example of someone unlike Drew and Ghello or Jello. Those two feel on the polished side. Those two feel like they've been on TikTok for a long time and maybe they have a team of people with them. Great example from professionalism standpoint. But Alexandra feels very homemade diy, just like an average person who's making content. And I think that's the approach that most people take with TikTok, especially when they're getting started. And it's really helpful to look at examples that don't intimidate you. And I find Alexandra's content to be very approachable and I love that about it. Okay, so once you have looked at content followed, some people have a better idea of where you want to start and you feel confident the next step is to Create content that's building trust and that feels real content that's adding value to your viewers, just like you would think about with your podcast, right? A great approach to podcasting is always thinking about, how can I be authentic? How can I add value? How can I show off who I am? And not show off in the sense of bragging, but like, you're telling the story about yourself, right? Building trust is more important than ever before on social media. So the word trust should be at the core of everything that you do. Some ways that you can do this is starting off by introducing yourself on TikTok. Who are you? Can you show part of your day? What do you do every day behind the scenes of your podcast? What does it take to put the podcast episode together? What's a lesson that you've learned recently? Can you do Q and a FAQs? These are very popular on TikTok. Once you start creating on TikTok, you can also respond to comments with another video. This is a very common tactic. Instagram, I think, just introduced this too, by the way, where you can respond to people by making a video. Keeping in mind that TikTok was created to bring people together. It was created for community. It was created to have fun, so you don't have to take it too seriously. It's all about experimenting and at the core, coming down to those keywords of trust, authenticity, and fun. And doing this consistently is really the big key. So some practical ideas for you as a podcaster are to create some snippets or some teasers of episodes. If you have video content already of your podcast, this is a place where you can start today if you wanted to. Similar to Drew's example that I saw last night on her TikTok account, they're just clips of the videos that she made with her guest. Or you could do audiograms. I don't think audiograms look as good as on TikTok. They're actually pretty rare. People like to see your face, they like to see video. But you could start with an audiogram if that's all you have. Right. The key is to start with where you're at. So snippets are a great, easy thing that you can do. Just finding a piece of your podcast, just like you would if you were sharing it anywhere else. On Instagram, for example. Same thing you could try. But just keep in mind that what works on Instagram might not and probably won't work on TikTok. As you'll see the more time you spend on it TikTok's kind of its own language, so that's why I say TikTok first. So looking at your content after you've spent time on TikTok will help you understand what might work best. But it is an experiment, right? In terms of length, by the way, there historically has been recommendations to keep your content to be 15 to 16, 30, 60 seconds long. But actually for a podcast clip you can go several minutes, maybe up to three minutes long. So you can look for a one to three minute long section of a recent podcast episode or a past one. Doesn't have to be recent. And find just something that feels really good and concise, adds trust, adds value to people. You can also do some ego base Potatize is really into this. Why? Well, if you have guests on your show, you might want them to share it with their audience and you want to make them feel really good. Share the best things that you said. I do this with my show. This might get uncomfortable. I actually rarely show clips of myself. I mostly share clips of my guests and this is for me and for them because it creates something that they can easily share. And lastly, supplemental content works really well. So this is like the behind the scenes style that I recommended. Bonus content. You could record TikTok videos right after you finish making a podcast episode. Just again, it can be a one minute segment. So find a key lesson from your recent episode and record it for TikTok. Do it in the app, just a summary of that episode, maybe something that you forgot to say in your podcast. You could also do outtakes. So if something really funny happened, if there's something that didn't feel suitable, maybe you want to keep the length of your podcast episode down, but you still really like that clip. You can put it in there. Just like if you're watching a movie or a TV show and they had outtakes because they weren't a good fit for the final packaged version of it. Same thing can work really well on TikTok and really thinking about content as you're watching. Other people can give you ideas for the supplemental content. Like I said, this can be something that complements an episode, promotes an episode is really something that is additional, anecdotal, insightful around the same topic. Pulling a quote from the episode, as I mentioned, something so that the viewer is intrigued enough to go listen to the full thing is really the big aim here. And so when you're thinking about this, you can also keep in mind how do you convert that TikTok viewer over to your podcast Few best practices here. Number one, make sure that there's a link to your podcast in your bio. I'm not sure what it is right now. In the past, I think you might have had to get a thousand followers on TikTok in order to include a link. I don't recall if that's changed off the top of my head, but you can still type the link to your podcast in your about section, so might not be clickable, but the URL is still there for reference in your about section. By the way, it's also important that you make it clear that you have a podcast, so don't forget to leave that out. Say podcast host of or host of this might get uncomfortable podcast. Anytime someone's curious about who you are and what you do, they're seeing it in the about section, you're reminding them that that's your big aim. Making sure that your content is branded is helpful. So using the same colors of your podcast, putting your logo somewhere in there, you can use branded hashtags like hashtag. This might get uncomfortable. Right? So it's keeping people in that mindset. Oh yes, she's a podcaster. This is a clip from her podcast. I understand. And similarly, optimizing your captions, you can use call to actions in your TikTok captions like Hear the whole episode in my recent podcast or go to this might get uncomfortable to learn more. Like adding something in there. Curious about the subject matter. Me too. It's in an upcoming episode, like coming up with something in your caption that after somebody's finished watching your video or while they're watching it, they can go to your caption and get more context for exactly what they're seeing and and they're getting directions for what to do after they're done watching. It is important to keep in mind, though, that your big aim should not always be to convert people away from TikTok. As I said earlier, building a TikTok following is valuable. Just like Drew again, as an example, she started as a TikToker and then became a podcaster and now they're working together. So you might not always want to have a call to action. Keep in mind that TikTok doesn't want people to leave the platform, so you might want to mix up your call to actions. You might want to leave them out. You don't want it to always be about an action. A lot of people just want to scroll through TikTok and keep watching videos. That's why, like putting a link in your bio for when somebody wants to learn more about you is a great tactic. Doing more subtle call to actions or subtle reminders of who you are and what you do may work better on that platform.

So with all of this said, we have been experimenting over at Potitize and my last piece of advice for you is to follow along with our journey. We just started a few months ago, starting to brainstorm. We've been experimenting as a team. We're posting different things. We've been doing a lot of clips. Tracy, I think, has recorded at least one video specifically for TikTok. I'm going to be encouraging Tom to do the same thing. So taking all these things that I've mentioned today and working that into our strategy and you get to watch us do it from the ground up. Right? That's what's really cool about seeing a new account. I think we have like four or five videos on there right now. We're brand new, so we'd love for you to follow. That's a great support. We'd love your comments. And when you follow us, we can follow you back. We can comment on your videos too. We can all be part of this together and help each other grow.

Fantastic. Whitney, so great. Thank you for sharing all of that. It was just so valuable. I learned a bit about TikTok today that I didn't know to tap onto a little bit of what Whitney was saying. Drew Rin is a musician, so she came out of the X Factor TV show. She was on that with Simon Cowell and whoever else is on it. And so she has a larger following already because of that. And so for her to make podcasting work, coming out as a musician is actually really interesting. So she's definitely one to follow and see what she's doing. We are relaunching her show. She did one season and then she moved to us and now she's going to stop the season. She's going to keep going. She just wasn't sure she was going to like it and now she does in the podcast is called Laundry Day, by the way, which she doesn't have yet into her about, which was so important. So really good tip there, Whitney.

So, yeah, it was really neat because the first time I went to her TikTok account, like a few days ago, she didn't have anything promoting her podcast. And then last night while I was prepping this presentation, she had a new video and I was really excited about that.

That's because we're starting to produce our episodes. So she's got clips and she's got some things that are coming in for it. So for those of you who are our clients and hearing this, so some of you who listen to this on Feed your brand are not our clients. Right. So but if you're here in the the group listening to this, you are remember that if you have the social media asset program, you have the multimedia package of production, it includes assets for this particular purpose. So if you need a different size, a different shape, a different length, you need those things happening. All you have to do is say, this is what I want for TikTok. Our team actually already knows what the dimensions are, what everything that's going to work that's going to make it right for it. So you do need to provide a little guidance, but we can take that. And you say, I always want a one minute clip, a one and a half minute, whatever it is that you want. We'll find that for you and take care of that. We do want you to have input though, as to what you're looking for from a content perspective. So if you say, hey, wherever I talk about these tips or wherever I ask this question of all my guests, that's where I'd like you to pull a one minute clip or a three minute clip. That's a really easy way for you to do it in a systematic way for the future.

How do you feel, Tom, after hearing this? Are you excited to create some TikTok content for Pottercars? I'm excited to create content for anything. I love creating content. Okay. I mean, I don't have TikTok even on my phone. I mean, I'm not doing it. I don't know about it. I probably would like other to do it, other people to do it for me if I could. But I guess I'm willing to record those videos and we'll put them up on the Poditize site and we're already doing that already, Tom, with your clips from other episodes. But I think given that you love to create content, you could, if you wanted, create that supplemental content after your next episode.

Right. Well, Whitney, thank you so much for coming on and staying extra long and all of you for listening. And for those of you who had to pop off of Facebook and waiting for us there and came into Zoom, we really appreciate you for doing that too. So I know we got somebody else coming on next and so we'll look forward to having another member of the team next week. And LinkedIn is coming, I got that planned for the first of May. So we're definitely going to be going over LinkedIn and 1st of May and then Whitney can go in deeper dive on LinkedIn as well in the future.

So.

Well, thank you again Whitney.

Thank you all.

Take care. Have a great week and we'll see you next week.

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