Get Your Music To TikTok
Having your music on TikTok is the first step and a requirement you have to meet before thinking about a strategy to promote your music on TikTok. This step used to be easy but due to copyright issues, uploading your music on TikTok got slightly more complicated. But don’t worry: here are 4 steps to upload your music to the platform.
- Create a TikTok account.
- Create a video with an external video editor app of your choice (f.e. BeeCut) and add your music to it.
- Now upload this video to your TikTok Profile.
- Open the video, click to your profile photo in the bottom right corner of the screen and name your song.
If you want to avoid these steps you can get in touch with a music distributor such as Ditto Music who will take over the work. gigmit users can now get 20% off their first year of releasing their music with Ditto Music, including TikTok, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Deezer and more. gigmitPRO users can even release UNLIMITED music on all of the biggest platforms for FREE for one year. Find out more HERE.
Et voilà! Your track can now be found on TikTok.
Make TikTokers Use Your Music
Now that your music is on TikTok you can start thinking about a strategy to make your fans (or even TikTok Stars) use your song and make your music go viral.
#Challenges
A Tiktok Challenge is a challenge for users to keep up with a new trend: they record a video to get as many views and likes as possible. It is one of the best means to increase your popularity. How? As a musician, you can engage your followers to lipsync or dance to your songs. Creativity is key in this case! Having an extraordinary dance move in your music video will, of course, be a good challenge which your followers could imitate in their own videos.
#Hashtags
Similar to other social media channels like Facebook or Instagram, hashtags help you extend the reach of your posts. If you set a hashtag in a post, it will be linked to the topic and made available in the TikTok “hashtag search”. All posts using this hashtag will appear. Your post will also be visible for users outside your network.
#Influencers
If you don’t want to be actively engaged in the whole TikTok sphere you can also consider collaborating with influencers. They have the ability to influence and affect the opinions of their own fanbase. If you get in touch with a good influencer he or she can launch a challenge for you for consideration. That means you’d have to pay. Her or his followers will then most likely participate in the challenge and post a video syncing your music too.
#Reach
On its own website, the company explains: “When you open TikTok and land in your For You feed, you’re presented with a stream of videos curated to your interests, making it easy to find content and creators you love. This feed is powered by a recommendation system that delivers content to each user that is likely to be of interest to that particular user.”
The TikTok Algorithm
Suggested clips on the For You Page: These three factors are considered by the TikTok algorithm.
- User Interactions: Likes and shares are also crucial for TikTok in determining whether users will see a video or not. The algorithm also takes into account which accounts users follow and which profiles they are subscribed to. Comments made and received as well as the type of content uploaded (for example, dance clips) are also decisive in determining which videos are displayed to the user on the For You page.
- Video information: Those who add #hashtags, clip descriptions, or special sounds and songs to their own video have a greater chance of being considered by the TikTok algorithm and going viral.
- Device & settings: These factors are not as crucial as the previous two, but still should not be ignored. Language, location, and device type are important for TikTok to play out the content in the best way for users.
Positive Effects
If your clips are watched to the end, the algorithm evaluates this positively! However, TikTok provides another factor that could be crucial for videos to appear in other users’ feeds: “A strong indicator of interest, such as whether a user finishes watching a longer video from beginning to end, would receive greater weight than a weak indicator, such as whether the video’s viewer and creator are both in the same country.”
Accordingly, it increases the reach of a video if users watch it to the end. TikTok adds: “To help kick things off we invite new users to select categories of interest, like pets or travel, to help tailor recommendations to their preferences. This allows the app to develop an initial feed, and it will start to polish recommendations based on your interactions with an early set of videos. […] Your For You feed isn’t only shaped by your engagement through the feed itself. When you decide to follow new accounts, for example, that action will help refine your recommendations too, as will exploring hashtags, sounds, effects, and trending topics on the Discover tab.”
As a result, all user interactions are important to what clips the app displays to users. This also means that search queries, for example, are taken into account by the TikTok algorithm.
The Role of Performance & Profile Status
In addition to the main factors for video suggestions, TikTok also revealed how users should discover new content: “[…] sometimes you may come across a video in your feed that doesn’t appear to be relevant to your expressed interests or have amassed a huge number of likes. This is an important and intentional component of our approach to recommendation: bringing a diversity of videos into your For You feed gives you additional opportunities to stumble upon new content categories, discover new creators, and experience new perspectives and ideas as you scroll through your feed.”
TikTok is trying to make users’ feeds as diverse as possible. Users should be able to discover new content and yet unknown creators. More important than this information for brands and artists, however, might be the following insight: “While a video is likely to receive more views if posted by an account that has more followers, by virtue of that account having built up a larger follower base, neither follower count nor whether the account has had previous high-performing videos are direct factors in the recommendation system.”
This is where TikTok differs from other social networks. The company explains that the previous performance and the status of an account do not influence the algorithm. Known TikTokers would only have a larger reach because more users follow their accounts. However, the TikTok algorithm would check each clip individually and then play it out in a suitable user feed.
OK… But Which Song?
Choosing a catchy track is important. Try to see things from the users perspective and select a song which your fans or other TikTok users can create content with (e.g a challenge). And remember that the maximum length of TikTok videos is 60 seconds. So use the right extract of the right song.
To give you an idea we created a playlist with a few songs which got viral on TikTok.
So this is a way to promote your music on TikTok.
If you prefer the classic path, find your next live gig HERE.