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Generative AI is everywhere now. You see it in content, campaigns, customer experiences, and even internal workflows. It promises speed, scale, and efficiency, but there’s a harder question sitting underneath all that progress; Do your audiences actually trust it?

Trust in the Age of AI: What Consumers Really Think About AI Generated Content

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

No matter where you live, food is a hot topic of conversation. From the latest viral recipes to the topic of sustainability, which we explore in depth in our 2024 Consumer Insights: Food & Beverage report, there’s no shortage of interest and concern when it comes to how we feed ourselves. 

There’s perhaps no topic more pressing and universal than that of how food prices and other costs of living are rising. To learn more about how consumers are feeling, thinking, and talking about food prices, we analyzed relevant English-language keywords mentioned online and in the media from August 1, 2023 through July 31, 2024. Read on as we dig into our findings on:

The conversation across selected social media sources

Check out our food and beverage report to dive into one of the biggest food and beverage topics in consumer conversations.

There were 16.2 million mentions of food costs, prices, and inflation on social media sources, forums, comments, and blogs worldwide from August 1, 2023 through July 31, 2024, an increase of 368% YoY. 

The sentiment of those mentions is largely negative for obvious reasons — higher food prices negatively impact consumers’ lives.

However, sentiment was not the same across sources. Mentions on Reddit and X and in comments and forums were more negative than positive. The notable outlier is Pinterest, where the conversation was overwhelmingly positive. More on that below.

Unlike other digital destinations where users often go to share news, find advice, and vent their frustrations, Pinterest is mainly where users go to find inspiration, an inherently upbeat activity. The prevalence of keywords like “budget” and “home” and hashtags like #weeknightdinner and #easyrecipe highlights how price-conscious consumers use the site to answer a recurring question: What should I make to eat that’s tasty and affordable? (For one example, check out this post.)

On Reddit, which has its largest user base in the United States, the cost of eating out and delivery was a top conversation. The three most engaging posts, including the one shown below, discussed price hikes for fast food and delivery options.

Together they generated about 207,500 engagement actions, including about 10,700 comments about users’ increasingly negative perceptions of prices at leading chains and shifting habits around going out to eat.

On X, the majority of relevant posts were reposts, which often amplify messages that users think are important or worthy of discussion. The most reposted was the one below, which sparked comments praising the founder of Arizona Iced Tea and discussing the prices of the drink at their local stores.

Focusing on mentions of relevant keywords in English, our analysis found that the countries that racked up the highest volumes of food price and inflation conversation were the United States, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India.

And while the conversations have commonalities — such as frequent mentions of their national leaders and largely negative sentiment — they differ in some notable ways. 

In the United States, the price of eggs was a lightning rod in the online food price discussion. The largest spike in conversation came on November 22, 2023. That day mentions surged six times higher than average as news broke of a U.S. federal jury’s verdict that major egg producers conspired to drive up egg prices. Though the legal case focused on activity from 2004 to 2008, the story caught fire thanks to its relevance to media coverage and online discussion throughout 2023 about rising egg prices. One of the most engaging pieces of content from that day was the below post on X contrasting the story with claims that egg prices had increased due to supply chain issues or inflation. 

Though the post conflated current egg pricing with the decades old actions at issue in the suit, it resonated with current consumer frustrations, generating more than 47,000 engagement actions.

While eggs were a major focus in the U.S. food price discussion, that distinction went to rice in Nigeria, as seen in the word cloud above. Many of the posts mentioning rice also mention its price as a significant factor in the economy and inflation. Some posts discuss the distribution of rice as a solution to food inflation, while others question the effectiveness of this approach. 

Of the top two conversation spikes, the second-largest occurred on February 15, 2024, when President Bola Tinubu met with state governors at the State House to discuss rising food costs and inflation. Tinubu’s post on X about the meeting generated the highest engagement, with more than 32,000 actions. 

The largest spike occurred a few months later on June 3, 2024, when the nation’s leading labor unions, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC), initiated a general strike calling for an increased federal minimum wage. The strike was sparked, in part, by inflation and increased costs of living, including food costs. 

“Raw yam,” “bad meat,” “food inflation,” “whole tuber,” and “can’t buy food” were among the top keywords in the food price conversation that day. The strike came to an end the following month when the government settled with the labor unions on a higher minimum wage.

The largest spike in the overall UK food price conversation came on January 6, 2024. Mentions jumped above 8,100, up from about 3,800 the previous day, thanks to the release of multiple articles and posts discussing the negative impact of new Brexit rules on the cost and availability of fresh fruit and vegetables. One of the most shared links was the below explainer news segment posted by ITV News on X.

Notably, after X, forums were a top source of food price conversations in the United Kingdom, with an average of about 1,760 mentions per day. The top forum was thefarmingforum.co.uk, where users go to discuss all things related to farming and agriculture. Many posts discussed beef and lamb prices, with mentions of price trackers and monitoring market conditions. 

Canada’s food price conversation was the most critical of the five, with 58% negative sentiment. The single largest day for food price conversations was September 15, 2023, when mentions surged above 7,380 in one day compared to 282 mentions the day before. That increase in volume was due to a rise in debate of how federal policies impact food prices, sparked by the announcement that CEOs of Canada’s five biggest grocery chains were expected to meet with government leaders to discuss how to stabilize prices. 

The buzz around that meeting helped make Loblaws, Walmart, and Costco some of the most mentioned entities in the conversation. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the most mentioned entity of all. 


In India, the biggest day for food price conversations was July 15, 2024, when mentions spiked eight times higher than average. The increase in volume was due to the state of Karnataka government's price hikes and fare increases, including on milk prices, water bills, property taxes, and more.

In the resulting public criticism and discussion, milk and vegetables emerged as the most highly mentioned food items. 

Looking at the volumes of news and broadcast media coverage of food costs and prices, mentions from July 2023 through July 2024 are lower than in the previous period, but still much higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Notably, while “people” and “market” were once top keywords in coverage of food prices, inflation has been the most-mentioned term over the last three periods analyzed. Looking at the past year of news and broadcast coverage, there were about 1.72 million mentions of inflation, down 35% from the previous period. One of the most-shared news stories about inflation, mentioned more than 2,400 times in other articles and posts, was an Associated Press article from April 27, 2023 titled, “Food prices fall on world markets but not on kitchen tables.”

Meanwhile, the relevant news coverage that had the furthest estimated reach, at 246 million, were The Weather Channel’s June 20, 2024 video about climate change’s impact on banana prices and March 21, 2024 video about a Texas wildfire’s impact on beef prices. 

Leading grocery and fast food chains join politicians and government departments as some of the top entities mentioned in many facets of the food price conversation. The world is looking to this mixture of the public and private sector for answers on where food prices and inflation are headed. 

Some of the content generating the most positive feelings are those that offer immediate remedies, like budget-friendly recipes and tips on where to shop. However, the focus and tenor of the overall food price conversation varies from source to source and market to market. Brands should drill down on what narratives and topics are most visible with their particular audience to formulate messaging and strategies. 

Looking for more insight into the food and beverage sector? Dive into the topic of sustainability in our 2024 Consumer Insights: Food & Beverage report and learn more about Meltwater for Food & Beverage.

Food Prices and Inflation: What’s Trending in Online Conversations and Media Coverage

Successful marketing hinges on knowing who you’re trying to reach. When you know more about the people most likely to buy from you, you can tailor your offering, messaging, and customer journey to fit their needs. To find these special nuances and know what makes your customers unique, we recommend doing a target group analysis.

As marketers, we often find ourselves juggling multiple campaigns, brands, and messages. Each one intends to target the most relevant customers, and customer groups can vary between brands and campaigns.

When you start with a target group analysis, you can identify exactly who you need to speak to, making it easy to craft a message that resonates.

Here’s a closer look at the purpose of a target analysis group and how to do it right.

More Tools and Techniques for Target Group Analysis

Maximizing the Value of Target Group Analysis with Meltwater

We define target group analysis as the process of finding what makes your audience unique, the characteristics they share, and what matters to them.

You might also hear target group analysis called audience segmentation.

As marketers, our goal is to connect with our audience in a way that drives action — whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or simply engaging with our content. 

To make that connection, we need to understand our audience on a deeper level. This is where target group analysis comes into play.

It’s all about diving deep into the specifics of who your target audience is — their demographics, behaviors, preferences, pain points, and more. 

By conducting a thorough analysis, you can tailor your marketing efforts to meet their needs — and ultimately, achieve better results.

You wouldn’t try to sell winter coats to customers in tropical climates, right? No matter how great your product is, your marketing messages just aren’t going to land.

That’s why target group analysis matters. It gives you the opportunity to uncover what segments of your audience truly need and want.

Creating relevant content your audience will care about

Optimizing your marketing spend by focusing on channels your audience segment uses

Improving the experience with marketing personalization

When customers feel heard and understood, they’re more likely to act and stay loyal to your brand.

This can lead to several tangible, measurable benefits, including:

A stronger and more obvious competitive advantage

Whether you’re aiming to boost sales, generate leads, or increase engagement, a well-executed target group analysis will help you create campaigns that are more likely to convert.

TIP: Check out our blog on the benefits of data-driven marketing campaigns!

Target group analysis in digital marketing is more than just a one-time exercise. Your customers’ preferences shift, and so do demographics. That’s why it’s important to master the art of identifying consumer behavior and knowing how to adjust your marketing accordingly.

Let’s review the steps involved in finding your target analysis group.

Data should inform every marketing communication strategy. You can use data sources to help you learn more about your customers and the best ways to reach them.

Google Analytics can reveal a lot about the people who are already browsing your website. You can check these analytics to discover how customers are finding you, what they’re looking at, and how long they’re spending on your site, for example.

Analytics can also help you map the customer journey. Know the steps your customers take from discovery to conversion and everything in between. 

With this intel, you can pair your campaigns to specific channels to build on your previous wins.

If you’re using Facebook or Instagram to promote your business, tap into your built-in analytics to learn more about your audience. You can uncover demographic information, behaviors, and more in the Meta Business Suite. 

Go to the Meta Business Suite, then click Insights on the left-side menu. 

You’ll see a breakdown of your audience’s ages and gender mix, as well as top cities and your best-performing content.

Tools like Meltwater’s Consumer Intelligence solution can help you get inside the minds of your customers. Review data surrounding behaviors, channels, attitudes, and more, then adapt your marketing strategy to fit each audience segment.

Our data is built on a live social feed, giving you a real-time view of your customers. What’s more, the platform also gives you the best next steps so you can take action on your findings.

Want to see how our Meltwater Consumer Intelligence can help you segment your audiences beyond simple demographics? Click here and fill out the form below for a demo!

With the data above, you can start finding connections between customers. There are lots of ways you can group customers together. For example, you might have a large following in a particular city or region. Or, a large portion of your customers might be women.

These connections are easy to find, but they’re not always the most effective way to segment your audience.

Instead, you can dig deeper into the hidden connections between customers. For example, how did they discover your brand? What have they bought from you? What are they interested in beyond your brand?

You might even combine several of these connections to find a small but highly specific group of customers for your marketing campaign.

The goal of segmentation is to find a group of customers who share a similar need that you can fill — and then tailor your marketing to show how you can fill it in a way they’ll notice and respond to.

Once you have your audience segments, you can decide how to reach them with your marketing. Consider the channels, content types, and calls to action that will encourage them to act.

This is a simplified example of a target group analysis model. These steps involve a lot of legwork, but this framework can help you stay the course and get the results you expect.

Now that you have a target group analysis, you’ll need to know what to do with the results.

Let’s use an easy target group analysis example. Imagine you’re a marketer about to launch a new snack food item. To get a lot of buzz before and on the day of the launch, you use a target group analysis. 

1. You identify three key audience segments who would be the most interested in your snack food: eco-conscious Millennials and Gen Zers, health-conscious parents, and foodie enthusiasts.

2. You develop buyer personas to represent each audience segment:

Eco-Conscious Emily: A 28-year-old graphic designer who actively supports healthy eating. She shops at local organic stores and is highly influenced by sustainability certifications and brand transparency.

Healthy Hannah: A 34-year-old mother of two who works part-time and is very health-conscious. She reads labels carefully and prefers foods with ingredients that are safe for her children and the environment.

Foodie Freddie: A 22-year-old college student who loves experimenting with new food products. He’s somewhat of an influencer and is drawn to brands that have attractive packaging and content.

In this phase, you’ll also need to consider where these personas spend their time. In many cases, you’ll need to use an omnichannel marketing approach to effectively reach your audience.

3. You create a tailored marketing strategy for each persona, speaking directly to their needs.

For Emily, focus on messaging around sustainability, ethical sourcing, and quality ingredients. Highlight the food’s sources and use content like blog posts, social media campaigns, and influencer partnerships that resonate with their values.

For Hannah, emphasize the product’s natural ingredients and suitability for the whole family. Consider using testimonials from other parents, educational content about the benefits of dye-free foods, and partnerships with parenting bloggers.

For Freddie, leverage social media influencers to create buzz around the product’s effectiveness and trendy attributes. Use visually appealing content like photos, videos, and limited-time sample offers to drive excitement.

4. After the product launch, monitor how your campaigns perform in each segment. Use analytics to track metrics like engagement, conversion rates, and customer feedback. 

If you find that one segment is responding better than others, you can adjust your strategy to focus more on that group or refine your approach to the less responsive segments.

In addition to using the data sources already mentioned, you can create a more comprehensive target group analysis with these tools and techniques.

Customer surveys and interviews give you direct insights from your audience. Their responses can help you understand their preferences, behaviors, and pain points. 

Interviews add an extra layer of insight by allowing two-way feedback. This gives you an opportunity to ask follow-up questions or gain clarity around their responses. You also have the benefit of seeing the person you’re talking to, including their body language.

To create an effective survey or interview, you’ll need to do the following:

Define an objective for the survey or interview (e.g., discover pain points with existing products, find the factors that influence buying decisions).

Design the survey using a mix of question types (e.g., open-ended, multiple choice, scale ratings) to get the answers you want.

Distribute the survey to your segments (e.g., email, social media).

Social listening tools monitor conversations across multiple social media platforms, giving you a more complete view of customers and prospects.

That’s because social media is a place where guards come down and people say how they feel. You can get a clearer understanding of their real feelings and thoughts, which may prove valuable in finding connections between your various customers.

TIP: Our free eBook The Definitive Guide to Social Listening provides everything you need to know about social listening technology. Check it out!

Meltwater helps you create a target group analysis template with done-for-you consumer intelligence. Our platform gives you the inside scoop on what your audience is talking about across the web. We help you find the hidden patterns between customers so you can identify essential segments you didn’t realize existed.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below!

Target Group Analysis: Understanding Your Ideal Customers

Whether you’re a consumer brand looking to make a splash, or a content creator who wants to be the next big thing, TikTok is a great place for sharing video to a wide audience. The platform gives creators a good selection of video formats to play with, including standard clips of anywhere between 15 seconds and 30 minutes in length, 15 second Stories which disappear after 24 hours, or live streams of up to an hour. 

On top of this, there are plenty of tools you can use to customize your videos, along with a huge library of music and sound effects - it’s truly a creative playground. Effective social media management can help you make the most of these features, ensuring your content reaches the right audience at the right time. And if you’ve got strong content, it’s one of the best social media platforms for building a large audience.  

But one of the biggest struggles people encounter when they first start using the channel is how they can get more TikTok followers, and it can be pretty demotivating when they work hard to create great content that just doesn’t seem to generate the volume of views or engagement they hoped for. So in this post, we’ve listed 37 ideas to help all TikTok users grow their audience:

What’s the overall theme or topic of your TikTok account? If you’re posting about everything and nothing, it’s going to be hard to attract a regular audience, because people want to follow accounts that have content focused on something they’re interested in. 

Most of us are unlikely to build a big following purely through sheer force of personality alone - so whether it’s comedy or cooking, fashion or fishing, you need to pick an area to focus your content on so you can draw in an audience that is interested in that topic.

Who are the people that already follow you, or who follow other creators within your niche? Learn as much as you can about them, what kind of people they are, and what they’re interested in. The more you know about the audience you’re trying to reach, the more ammunition you’ll have to create content that resonates with them. 

People will follow you on TikTok because of your content, but your bio will help snare those viewers who perhaps liked a video they saw and came to find out more about you. Keep it simple, let them know exactly who you are and what they can expect from you. If your bio is confusing or uninteresting, you could lose potential followers. 

To get followers on TikTok you really need to understand how the platform and its culture works, and the best way to do that is to be a follower yourself instead of just posting and ignoring everybody else. Follow other people within your niche, engage with them, participate in the community and get a feel for it so you can see how the experience feels from the perspective of the followers you’re trying to reach - this will put you in a much stronger position to make your own account succeed. 

The TikTok algorithm needs a little time to figure out what your account is all about, so it can show your content to the people who are most likely to be interested in it. For this reason, it’s important to make sure your content stays relevant to the topic you have chosen, especially when your account is still relatively new. Once you have posted a lot of content and have a few thousand followers, it might be safe to stray off-topic occasionally, but if you want to build an audience it’s best to stay on target as much as possible. 

We’re going to assume you already know that having good quality content is essential, but don’t forget the importance of production values. Your video needs to look as good as possible, and you don’t even need a high end camera because most modern smartphones are capable of shooting great video, but there are other things to consider. The two most important things to fix are lighting and stabilization. 

Make sure your videos are filmed where there is plenty of natural light so people can see you, or invest in some affordable lighting; there are plenty of online tutorials about how to light a video well. Stabilization is even easier. To begin with you can just make sure your phone or camera is propped up on any convenient stable surface, but it’s a good idea to buy a tripod which will make this much simpler. 

7. Get Seen, Go Viral, Get More TikTok Followers

Ultimately, the best way to get more TikTok followers is for your videos to be seen by as many people as possible. Your content won’t be for everybody, but the more visibility you have, the more opportunities there will be for it to be seen by people who like it and want to follow you to get more. So, while your overall goal should always be to create good content for the audience you want to reach, it doesn’t hurt to think about how you can make videos that might go viral. 

A good way to help increase the viral potential of your videos is to keep an eye on trending themes and formats. It seems as though every week there’s a new craze spreading across the platform, so if you’re sharp and you can think of ways to adapt a trend to your topic, you improve your odds of the video going viral. The key is to be quick on your feet - it’s no good jumping on a trend that’s already had its moment, you need to be able to produce a relevant video while people are still obsessing over the trend. 

A lot of people watch TikTok videos without sound, often because they’re in a situation where they are unable to listen to the audio. Also, some of your audience may have hearing problems. Whenever your videos feature you or somebody else speaking, be sure to include closed captions so that people can still enjoy the content - this will open up your videos to a much wider audience. You can use TikTok’s auto-caption feature, or a third party tool to add captions in your preferred style. 

TikTok gives you up to 2200 characters to write a description of each video - but that doesn’t mean you should use them all! People aren’t on TikTok to read essays, so keep your descriptions punchy and to the point, but be sure to include all of the relevant information about the content of the video, including important keywords that people may be searching for in relation to your content. 

You don’t need to show your face or even use your own voice on videos, and plenty of successful accounts don’t do either. But, if you’re struggling to get TikTok followers, and the kind of content you create could work in that way, showing your face is a great way to add some personality to your videos. This can help grow your follower count because people often find it more relatable when they can see the person who created the video, and that helps them to develop more of an interest in you. 

The first three seconds of your videos are incredibly important for “hooking” your audience’s attention, so you need to open with a phrase or idea that will draw people in, some common examples are: 

You’re not going to believe this, but…

The best kind of hooks not only draw people in, but provide a strong incentive for them to watch your video all the way to the end. Here are some ideas: 

 5 tips on how to get more TikTok followers - number 5 is unbeatable!

Start with the end - show a surprising or shocking ending to your content, and then show people how it happened. 

Do a challenge which will have either an impressive result or an epic fail at the end.

Ranking or listing - take something your followers are interested in and make a ranking video, because they’ll always want to know what your best/worst choice is. 

Plagiarism is bad, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with looking at the content themes and formats that are working for successful TikTokers, and taking a little inspiration from them. They almost certainly borrowed ideas from other creators when they got started, and you can do the same - find ideas that work and adapt them for your own content. 

When you post a video TikTok will automatically generate a thumbnail for you, but it’s better to add a custom thumbnail that you’ve created yourself. There are lots of online guides to creating great TikTok thumbnails that will encourage people to watch your videos and help you snare more followers, but the key thing is to make the image look as interesting and engaging as possible, and use a little text to describe your hook, so people will be drawn in. 

Commenting on and interacting with accounts in a similar topic to you will help establish your account as a participant in that niche area, making it easier for people who share that interest to find and follow you. It’s also a good way to network with influential creators who share the same interests as you. 

16. Partner With Creators and Influencers

Working with other creators who have similar interests to you is a great way to get more TikTok followers. By collaborating on content together, you can become more visible to each other’s audiences and gain new fans. 

People often discover new accounts to follow when they’re reading the comments under a video they’ve just watched. If you consistently add good comments to popular videos, you’ll increase your chances of being noticed and earning a few new followers. 

Think like a community manager! If people take the time to comment on your videos, show your appreciation by replying to them as much as possible, and create video replies if you can. This will help you to build a stronger relationship with the followers you already have, and in turn they are more likely to recommend you to others. 

Using a smart combination of TikTok hashtags on each of your videos will help ensure your content gets seen by the people who are most interested and who will more probably follow you. Use popular hashtags that broadly describe the overall topic your account covers, as well as more niche, focused hashtags that highlight the specific topics covered in each video. This way you get a good balance of high-volume and specificity. 

Posting content consistently and regularly will help your account to perform well and TikTok recommends that you post 3 to 5 times a week. But if you’re serious about gaining more followers on TikTok you should probably consider posting once a day at minimum. 

Every video you post gives you another opportunity to reach a wider audience, but don’t lose focus on quality - everything you post should be something you’re proud of creating. 

You can record TikTok videos of anywhere between 15 seconds and 30 minutes,  although some countries don’t yet have access to the full 30 minutes and are still limited to shorter times. In any case, try to experiment with different video lengths to see what works best for your style of content. 

You may find your audience responds better to shorter videos, or that they value the additional information you provide in a longer recording, or you might learn that it doesn’t make any difference. But you won’t know until you try different lengths.

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