Hot off the heels of their “Follow Me” series, TikTok has launched another marketing education platform designed to introduce business users deep practical insight into TikTok as a marketing tool rather than merely something your nephew does for fun between classes.
Whereas Follow Me was a set of limited, asynchronous, email-based lessons that marketers took in passively, TikTok Academy’s focus is on offering an expansive and expanding interactive platform where anybody within an organization can dive into modules targeted at exactly what they want to learn about the social media app’s business potential.
What is TikTok Academy?
TikTok Academy is a just-introduced platform for digital marketers to learn the ins and outs of TikTok as not just a social media platform, but as a powerful brand-building, marketing, and advertising opportunity. TikTok Academy is set up so that each individual user can go through specially-created curriculums designed to take someone with a background in digital marketing and turn them into a TikTok professional with deep insight into the platform.
Rather than simply offering a digital textbook to read through, TikTok Academy uses a gamified experience complete with quizzes, interactive activities, and progressive rewards systems designed to make any user proud to complete the various courses. The courses themselves are designed to be accessible to anybody who is interested in completing them, from entry-level employees to CEOs and from seasoned digital marketers to social media newbies. And because TikTok Academy is accessed per individual rather than per organization, each person can complete it at their own pace and feel their own sense of accomplishment.
What’s available through TikTok Academy?
Currently, TikTok Academy’s line-up of curriculums is limited to just 2 introductory courses: “TikTok 101” and “Small Business.” These are more-or-less what you’d expect based on the names and provide a fundamental introduction to the platform for business operators. But just because there aren’t many courses yet doesn’t mean the ones being offered aren’t full of useful and usable information.
TikTok 101 is a great place to start for businesses that are totally new to what TikTok is: TikTok Academy says to budget 2-4 hours for TikTok 101 and to prepare to cover a wide range of topics, including an intro to TikTok’s product offerings, information on what makes TikTok a safe and welcoming platform for new brands, and some creative best practices for when you finally get to making your own short-form video content.
Small Business is a shorter curriculum, asking for only an hour of your time. Split into four 15-minute lessons, the Small Business course covers the nuts and bolts of everything smaller businesses need to know to get started as a business account on TikTok. This includes simple walk-throughs on setting up your account, introductions to creating creative and engaging content, how to use TikTok’s various paid advertising options, and more.
Going beyond TikTok Academy
As helpful as the content on TikTok Academy is, and as much as we highly recommend going through it to help improve your business, there’s always more to learn. We’re excited to see how much TikTok Academy grows in what they offer, but the TikTok experts in the field know that many of the skills that make a business successful on TikTok can’t be taught in online courses.
The highest levels of TikTok success comes not from studying the tools available on the platform but from a keen eye towards cultural trends, a deep and intuitive understanding of how the TikTok feed works and how videos relate to each other, and how an attuned sense of how to connect with particular audiences through the platform. All this comes with time and experience–just working with the platform over and over until you come to a real understanding of what makes it tick (no pun intended).
Of course, when you’re a local business owner or operator, you may not have time to jump head-first into learning an entirely new platform. For those who want to work with professionals who already understand the ins and outs of every social platform–including TikTok–Skol Marketing’s team is here to help. For one-on-one guidance or to discuss how we can help your business kill it on TikTok, please don’t hesitate to contact the local social media experts at Skol Marketing.
