TikTok is now one of the most important platforms for businesses looking to engage with younger audiences. However, measuring the success of TikTok campaigns has always posed a challenge to marketers. In this article, we’ll explore how SentiOne — our flagship social listening and customer experience solution — can help businesses better monetise TikTok and analyse the success of their marketing efforts.

SentiOne: the perfect solution for social media marketing 

The online marketing landscape has undergone seismic shifts over the last several years. Online ads are universally perceived as an annoyance, as nearly half of all internet users use ad blocking software of some sort. Products and services, however, still need advertising — and so, the marketing world had to adapt.

As such, the state of play in 2023 can be summed up like this: social media is everything. This has been the case for some time now, and it’s not likely to change any time soon. Gen Z and millennials, the two most important demographics for online marketers, grew up with social platforms and make up the majority of their user bases — even up to 88% by some accounts.

This leads to a rather obvious conclusion: your marketing strategy needs to revolve around a deep understanding of social media. You can never have enough actionable insights, data analytics or trend predictions. That’s where social listening comes in.

Social listening is the practice of collating and analysing vast volumes of social media mentions for any given topic. Anything can be a mention: from single tweets, through news articles and blog posts, to comments on YouTube videos. Robust social listening solutions, such as our very own SentiOne, collect gigantic amounts of mentions from millions of diverse sources. These are then fed through cutting edge analysis algorithms and provide actionable insights, ready to be used in your marketing campaigns.

TikTok marketing fundamentals: influencers and user-generated content

For several years now TikTok has been one of the most important social platforms in the world. With just over a billion monthly active users, it eclipses platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat, and Telegram. It’s also a uniquely friendly platform for businesses who want to advertise to its users.

Although TikTok — like every other social media platform — offers a promoted post option, its true strengths lie elsewhere. As the top 30 brands on TikTok inform us, the two pillars of TikTok marketing are influencers and user-generated content.

The principle at play here is simple. Gen Z and millennials, which make up the bulk of the platform’s user base, are essentially allergic to traditional advertising. They will instantly skip or block an ad if given the option — and on TikTok, that’s just a matter of swiping to the next video. As such, the only way to reach them is either through content creators they follow, or by involving them directly.

TikTok is keenly aware of this, which is why the platform provides brands with exceptional tools for this sort of marketing. A good example of it is the TikTok Creator Marketplace, which lets brands connect with influencers fitting their precise requirements.

We have an entire article on the basics of TikTok marketing, if you’re interested in reading more.

Measuring TikTok campaign performance with SentiOne

So — how do we leverage the power of SentiOne to enhance your TIkTok marketing efforts? Quite easily, as it turns out.

SentiOne supports tracking the following types of content on TikTok:

• Public posts
• Comments
• Videos created by a specified account
• Your paid ads (once authorised, Enterprise plan customers only)

These options provide you with an incredible wealth of information. SentiOne’s prowess lies in its cutting edge sentiment and intent detection algorithms, developed in collaboration with world-class linguists. What does it mean in practice? SentiOne can tell how your audience feels about any given topic.

While TikTok analytics can tell you how many people saw your latest influencer collaboration, SentiOne can enhance that knowledge by telling you how many comments were positive in their tone, or conversely — how many people didn’t resonate with your campaign. You can take that further: SentiOne will tell you what the most common complaints (or points of praise!) were, providing you with a deep qualitative analysis of your marketing efforts.

Enhancing customer experience on TikTok through social listening

If this sounds like a big deal, that’s because it is. A vast majority of marketing is performed with only quantitative analytics in mind: how many people clicked on the ad, how many of those ended up making a purchase. While important, focusing on the raw numbers doesn’t tell you the whole story — it leaves out any insights about how your audience feels about a given product, service, or campaign on the table.

The long-term importance of data like that can’t be overstated. By constantly being aware of what type of content engages your audience, you will be able to better tailor your future marketing efforts towards the people you want to reach.

This, of course, doesn’t apply to just TikTok — since SentiOne supports every major social media platform (and millions of other sources, such as news sites, forums, blogs, and more), you will be able to build a wider sense of what moves different segments of your audience. After all, different demographics use different platforms. By analysing the behaviour and preferences of those segments, you will be able to better tailor your messaging for each platform your brand is on.

Real-world examples of businesses successfully using TikTok

With everything we’ve said so far, it’s not a huge wonder that brands embraced TikTok so enthusiastically. There are plenty of examples of successful campaigns conducted through TikTok — we already wrote about plenty of TikTok use cases and unorthodox business applications before. Here, then, are a couple of famous TikTok campaigns to give you an idea of what successful companies are doing on the platform.

@gilmhercroes

I Love @chipotle 🤩 I challenge you to try the #chipotlelidflip , can you do it?🤣 #ad

♬ Flip – Future

Chipotle was one of the first major brands to adopt TikTok. Its campaigns often make heavy use of UGC, such as the famous #ChipotleLidFlip — a trend that, as of this writing, amassed nearly 350 million views.

@keeoh

yo but where did the Redbull go😳🤷🏼‍♂️🤷🏼‍♂️ #sponsored

♬ original sound – Keeoh

Video games thrive on TikTok, and so do video game enthusiasts. Professional eSports players, in particular, made their home on the platform, and it is here that brands that wish to advertise with gamers reach out to them. In this collaboration, Red Bull asked professional Fortnite player Keeoh to take part in a popular trend of the platform. The result? Nearly a million views.

@buryme.withmybooks

also titled: books that killed me & then brought me back to life #booktoker #booktok #books #viralbooks #mustreadbooks #mustreads #foryoupage #foryou #fyp #favoritebooks #viral #bookworm #bookish #annotatedbooks #annotations #booksbooksbooks #bookrecommendations #bookrecs #booksiwouldsellmysoultoreadagain

♬ Scott Street (Slowed Down) – Phoebe Bridgers

In a case of an industry-wide phenomenon, BookTok serves as a constant source of campaign inspirations. We already wrote an entire article about it — but the gist of it is that authors, publishing houses and BookTok influencers form a tightly-knit ecosystem, in which new releases and old classics alike are promoted through endorsements from content creators, as well as videos created by regular users.

Closing words

As one of the most important social media platforms online, marketing on TikTok is more or less mandatory — at least if you want to reach younger demographics. This means being keenly aware of their rapidly shifting preferences, influencer allegiances and trends. Only world-class social listening tools can meet that challenge — and that’s where SentiOne Listen comes in.

If you don’t use a social listening solution yet, or are interested in taking SentiOne Listen out for a spin, don’t wait — get in touch with us and book your demo period today.