Should I Move My Business to TikTok? Understanding Social Media Migration
Everyone is on TikTok! Should I move my business to TikTok instead? Is TikTok better?
These might have lingered in your mind primarily if you handle your business’s social media accounts. Frequently, less engagement or few sales from Facebook and Instagram exhaust owners and look to TikTok as a redeeming platform.
We call this social media migration, wherein an online brand/entity moves to another site or app and creates a social media account, leaving the original, similar to restarting the online entity of a business.
I can’t blame them; TikTok has grown as one of the most prominent social media spaces because its short-form video content sparks memes and trends almost daily. From dance covers, funny videos, and even informative clips- the app is truly a game changer in their digital-first approach.
Still, to answer the dilemma above, the answer is both a “yes” and a “no,” depending on where you are as an online brand and who you are as a social media identity.
Yes, move to TikTok as it opens up new ways to a broader audience and younger market reach; and no, in a way that you still take the step of creating a TikTok account and build up your business in and through it, while not abandoning your Facebook and Instagram accounts for good.
Strategy is to go for all social media platforms, and not focus on one. Here are the reasons why:
Each Social Media Platform is Unique
Social media platforms always incorporate a unique feature and identity to their digital spaces. Tiktok, for example, is all about videos, typically short-form videos of skits, challenges, lip-sync, and dance craze. In fact, TikTok executives referred to their app as more of an “entertainment” platform than social media.
Facebook, on the other hand, has omnibus features. From static postings of images and text, GIFs, long and short-form videos, added features like polls, trivia, community, and group management, while Instagram banks more on photographic postings.
Most experienced digital marketers understand the relevance and impact of multi-platform marketing because there is clarity that audience demographics and psychographics are quite varied, ever-changing, and broad- one single social media account cannot sustain these.
Avoid Starting Over Again Online
Most online businesses begin their online journey, apart from having a website, by creating a Facebook page and linking it with a corresponding Instagram account and TikTok for a different content approach and engagement strategy.
This is a simple yet effective way in introducing your brand to social media users, and a great way to engage with current and prospect customers. With Metabusiness features, Facebook helps target specific audiences and advertise to them in a cost-efficient way while building a community circled around your brand and provides an avenue for community marketing.
In becoming digital, communal approaches are effective strategies, and in the digital communities formed, membership marketing becomes the game’s new name. People crave membership and community; it’s a part of human nature that they look for in the digital sphere.
Before going to an entertainment platform such as TikTok, analyze your standing on Facebook first.
Have your followers grown within a definite length of time?
Next, ask yourself if there has been any development first on your side as the social media manager and business owner to get engagements and reach more people through varying content.
If yes- you’ve gained significant followers and garnered consistent engagement, this means you’re already manageable when communicating to your audience; a good indication you may start your account on TikTok for newer forms of content- this time videos.
If you cannot maintain a robust communal relationship online through your Facebook or IG accounts, connecting through TikTok would be a little challenging. Let’s say your page hardly grew in impressions, reach, and following. These are telltale signs that you need to work more on relating to your audience first and revamp your content. This is necessary to mend prior to migrating your brand to TikTok.
Ads Work Differently between Social Media Platforms
Social media ads are the hammer and nail for online businesses. As its main feature is to raise brand awareness, ads can be effective for marketing your product or service and your brand.
Ultimately, brands that migrated from one social media platform to another need clarification as to why their original ads setup and targeting approach on Facebook does not work on TikTok and vice versa.
TikTok ads had significantly cheaper cost-per-impressions (CPMs) than Facebook and Google across all our campaigns globally in the last three months, hardly less than half the traffic cost of Google and three times less than Facebook’s traffic.
However, Facebook ads can reach a specific group thanks to detailed targeting options like:
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Purchasing History
- Search History
- Dislikes
Especially with their dynamic experience feature, this lets businesses use one ad campaign across multiple audiences, which increases exposure and reduces costs at once. Moreover, competition is lower than on other online advertising venues; hence there may be less expensive ways to get your message out.
Both TikTok and FB ads have built-in A/B split testing capabilities, so you can constantly find effective combinations of creatives, content captions, and audiences. These powerful retargeting capabilities allow you to maximize your ad spending.
In bird’s eye view, the game is not using one platform over the other because it’s trendier or a lot of people talk about it, which makes it effective- Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media/entertainment digital spaces all have advantages that can help your brand grow and attract potential customers. And with the same level of benefits come disadvantages. But remember, the fundamental goal here is to build a community of loyal followers and customers- which social media is all about.
Connection more than Migration
Moving from one social media platform to another is a standard move for digital marketing, but abandoning one digital space for another, limits your chances of building a digital community around your business and brand.
Remember that online brands that utilize multi-platform strategies have better rates of awareness and conversions. If you’re a starting business- start first on Facebook and Instagram. Grow a community and gather followers with the right content that relates and connects to your market.
Play each platform’s strengths and use them to tailor-fit your goal. Move to TikTok once you have a clear view of what type of content your followers crave and digestible and have the resources to execute them.
Growing your brand takes time, but with consistent and tested content plus proper usage of features each social media platform offers, you could build a solid and well-loved business online with loyal customers.
