How to Get More Followers on TikTok: Your Ultimate Guide

Deborah
August 11, 2022
How to get more followers on TikTok: two women wearing glasses and posing

If you need to know how to get more followers on TikTok, get to know your audience. Then, look at these tips for optimizing your hashtag game and beyond.

How important is the number of followers to your brand on social media? Well, the Gen Z-favored social network TikTok launched a creator fund in 2021 to reward creators with monetary incentives. The program pays creators who create top engaging content on their platform. They choose these creators based on a scoring system that considers both follower count and engagement. Creators must have at least 10,000 followers and 100,000 original views within the previous 30 days to qualify. Plus, highly visible accounts can lead to brand partnerships. 

With 1 billion monthly users on the platform, surely it’s possible to find your people. In this guide, we dive deeper into tactical TikTok content creation and share strategies to help you grow your brand and gain followers on TikTok.

How to Get More Followers on TikTok with 6 Key Tips

How to get more followers on TikTok: group of people dancing

Common advice is to get your TikTok content featured on TikTok’s for you page (FYP) by posting according to TikTok trends and TikTok challenges. But this approach heavily depends on your goal on the platform. 

While jumping on trends back-to-back is great for quick hits and boosting your follower count, it is also the fastest way to lose your brand identity, attract a temporary audience, and, eventually, get burned out.

Let’s look at how to follow sustainable changes to improve your engagement. Here are some tips on how to use the TikTok algorithm to get more views on your video content and retain your TikTok account visitors.

1. Understand Your Audience

You can better connect with your target audience when you explore topics they find compelling.

The first step to this is figuring out what content your audience already engages with, and how they interact with it. Then, you can create TikTok videos to join in those conversations to gain followers in that niche and build trust with your audience. Otherwise, you could waste time posting content that won't reach the people you intended.

To determine what type of content your audience is already engaging with, explore their hashtags using the search bar.

2. Adopt a TikTok Hashtag Strategy

The goal of hashtags is to make people discover your content. A common mistake content creators make is only using their hashtags to describe themselves and what they do.

When you use hashtags this way, you are telling the algorithm to place your content in front of TikTok profiles similar to yours.

Unless you want to target creators in your niche, create a hashtag strategy that targets your ideal audience and those who stand to benefit most from the content. 

Second, use niche-specific hashtags to increase the visibility of your brand. Keep in mind, the more competitive a hashtag is (the more people using it), the harder it is to rank for that keyword. Hence, using only trending hashtags is not enough.

The right hashtag strategy combines niche-specific hashtags and broad hashtags. For instance, if you are targeting the tech audience on TikTok, you can use the #techtok as a broad hashtag, then narrow the others to specific audiences like #womenintech and #techmom.

Always research for relevant hashtags to your niche and content topic. Don’t just wing it when posting your video content.

3. Use Keywords in Your Video

Generally, using captions in your videos can lead to a 55.7% increase in views. That number can be even higher when your videos use frequently searched keywords. 

A recent study by Google shows that almost half of Gen Z uses TikTok and Instagram as search engines over Google. Find and include keywords that help content to appear on the first page of the search results for certain terms.

For instance, a search for "skin care tips for glowing skin" returns videos that have a mention of "glowing skin" in their caption, video, text description, and hashtags.

How to get more followers on TikTok: skin care tips on TikTok

Just like other popular platforms, you can see further search recommendations based on your location (gotten from your device settings).

How to get more followers on TikTok: beauty tips on TikTok

To optimize your posts, include top keywords in your captions and hashtags. This is besides other helpful hacks, such as using trending songs and sounds in your videos.

While there isn't any tool dedicated to finding top keywords yet, TikTok's on-site search engine is more than enough. To find top keywords, search seed terms (short search terms, like “lipstick”) and use the suggested related terms.

To find top hashtags to use, type in a topic of interest or keyword in the search bar. Then navigate to the Hashtags tab. There, you will see the volume of hashtag keywords.

How to get more followers on TikTok: arrows pointing at Hashtags on TikTok

Your goal is to rank on those topics with an existing community in your niche. To get the most out of your video, pick a keyword hashtag with views in the 4-6 figure range. That way you'll reach a community, not drown in the ocean of newly uploaded TikTok videos. 

Number of views on TikTok

4. Collaborate With Other TikTok Creators

There’s no need to compete with TikTok famous influencers. For influencer marketing, leverage the power of micro-influencers to get more followers on TikTok. Micro-influencers are people with a smaller following, but who often have a great deal of influence on their followers. You can reach out to content creators or TikTok influencers creating relevant topics to yours and ask them if they would ‌collaborate with you on content creation.

If you’re hesitant to do that, you can remix their video content using TikTok’s duet feature as a warm introduction or to get them to notice you.

Find micro-influencers who have fewer than 10k followers but are still interested in collaborating with you on content creation. Make sure to let them know what they stand to benefit from the collaboration as well be it mutual TikTok growth, or free TikTok content promotion.

5. Add a Link to Your Bio

Create compelling captions and call to action (CTA), which direct profile visitors to the link in your bio as a long-term customer retention strategy. That way, you can focus on creating content that drives business value and worry less about the changing algorithms.

Keep in mind that TikTok allows for only one clickable link in your biography. You need to make a good impression with this link, especially if you might have more content to share or a product offering to promote. To add a link to your TikTok bio, follow the steps in this guide.

Your HypeLink site can serve as a landing page to capture emails and phone numbers or redirect visitors to other websites and social handles.

Plus with Hype, you also have access to insights into how your followers engage with your content for data-driven decision-making.

6. Make Sure Your Profile Is Visitor Friendly 

Besides a link in bio profile optimization, brand your TikTok account. Use the same effects or filters on every video to make your TikTok profile stand out. 

@CarterPcs makes a brilliant show of this with his uniform thumbnail design and brand colors.

CarterPcs posts on TikTok

You can also use TikTok’s creator playlist feature to organize your content for an improved user experience for your TikTok followers.

CarterPcs profile on TikTok

It’s displayed as a scroll bar above your TikTok profile body. When a profile visitor clicks on it, they can watch through that curated playlist of related topics, as shown in the screenshot below.

Fav Switches on TikTok

You can also make your profile visitor-friendly by engaging your followers and creating content from their comments. 

This promotes user-generated content (UGC) marketing. UGC marketing not only encourages people to share your content, but it also leaves a good impression on visitors to your TikTok profile and encourages them to engage with your content. This helps you gain new followers, build an active community with a high engagement rate, and never run out of content ideas.

How to Get More Followers on TikTok: The Bottom Line

Portrait of people walking

If you're familiar with creating content on Instagram Reels, then you likely have a pretty good idea of what to expect from TikTok.

Indeed, there are more opportunities for organic reach on TikTok. However, these tips will help you get consistent views on your video content and gain real followers on your TikTok account.

Using our approach on how to get more followers on TikTok, you don’t have to buy TikTok followers or worry about fake followers or bots — you’ll be well on your way to getting high-quality followers on your TikTok account. Just remember these tips:

  • Understand your audience.
  • Use hashtags wisely.
  • Find top keywords to use in your videos.
  • Collaborate, don’t compete.
  • Add a link to your bio.
  • Keep your profile user-friendly.

 And remember, TikTok can become a better social media platform for driving brand awareness when you put your bio to good use. Hype's link-in-bio site makes implementing that a walk in the park.