If you’re acting like a hero with your TikTok content and insisting on organic reach…stop it. There is no shame in promoting a post using TikTok’s promotion feature. Even the best of us need help sometimes, like the time I got stuck in my pants at The Gap.
Not to put “peer pressure”on you, but every social media platform today has some sort of paid boost option. You can promote posts on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn with just a few clicks and reach audiences far beyond your own organic network.
In this post, we’ll dive into everything you need to know to make TikTok’s promotion feature work for you. If you want, consider it an “amplifier”of social advertising. (I’ll show up.)
What is TikTok Promotion?
The TikTok Promote feature allows you to turn your existing TikTok videos into ads with just a few taps.
The promotion feature is available for all TikTok accounts right in the TikTok app. Tailor your promotion to your budget, timeline, and target audience…then sit back as TikTok spreads your video everywhere.
Promotion can help you get views, traffic to your website, or increase your followers. Basically, if you have a few dollars to spend, Promoting is a quick way to increase your reach on TikTok.
When your campaign is complete, you can access all kinds of juicy analytics about the performance of your promoted TikTok video. Indicators such as:
- views
- Like
- Stock
- Comments
- Website CTR
- Age and gender of the audience
Before you start clicking the Promote button, please note that there are a few restrictions on what videos you can promote.
- The TikTok promotion feature only works for public videos.
- You cannot use the promotion for videos with copyrighted audio. (You’ll have to create a soundtrack from TikTok’s commercial music library of over 500,000 sound clips. Or, obviously, original songs and sounds will work too.)
- Videos may be rejected for promotion if they violate the TikTok policies (more on that below!)
Using a bit of this amplification magic on your TikTok content is absolutely not a scam – it’s just common sense.
There are many other ways to advertise on TikTok or boost organic TikTok marketing, but TikTok Promote is the best of both worlds. The promotion takes the creative, engaging TikTok content you’ve already created and uses the power of TikTok’s powerful algorithm to help it reach new audiences on your “For You”page.
How to promote on TikTok
TikTok’s promotion feature is pretty intuitive, but I’ll walk you through it step by step anyway. (I’m a real cutie despite what people at the Gap say about me.)
Before you begin: If you have an Android phone, you will be able to pay for a TikTok promotion with a credit card, but if you are using iOS, you will need to download TikTok Coins first.
1. Take a video and post it on TikTok. New in the app? Read here how to create a TikTok video and then go back to step 2.
2. Watch the video and tap the “…”icon with three dots on the right. This will open your video settings. Tap the Promotion icon (it looks like a small light).
3. Choose the goal of video promotion: more video views, more site visits or more subscribers.
4. Choose your audience. TikTok can choose for you, or you can customize your own based on gender, age range, and interests.
5. Set your budget by choosing how much you are willing to spend each day and how long you want the promotion to run. If you change any of these numbers, you will see your “estimated video views”change. Click “Next”when you’re happy with your budget.
6. On the Overview page, you will have one last chance to review your options before implementing the campaign. Your video will then be submitted for review.
Another way to access TikTok Promote is to find it in the Creator tools menu.
- Go to your profile and click on the three horizontal lines in the top right corner. A menu will open at the bottom of the screen – tap “Tools for Creators”.
- Tap Promote.
- Here, select one of your videos under the “promotional videos”heading and follow steps 3-6 above.
How much does TikTok promotion cost?
You set your own budget for TikTok promotion and choose how much to spend over a given number of days. The minimum spend to promote TikTok is $3/day and the maximum spend is $1,000/day.
TikTok will give you a range of estimated video views when you set your budget and timeline. As a general guideline, TikTok says you can rack up up to 1,000 views for as little as $10.
That being said: keep in mind that the specific audience you target can affect your reach.
You will be able to reach many more people if your targeting is broader (for example, all women aged 13-54), but if you narrow down to a super-specific audience (for example, men aged 55+ interested in beauty and personal care) you may find that your calculated views are slightly less. (However, in this case, you probably get quality even if you don’t get quantity.)
Should you promote TikTok?
The beauty and curse of social media: You never know what will click.
The thing is, nothing is guaranteed. You can memorize everything about the TikTok algorithm. You can post at the best time every day. And you can do everything you can to optimize your organic reach… and still lose.
So if you just can’t crack that For You page and want to help out a little, then yes, promoting TikTok is worth it.
Depending on your specific goals and target audience, TikTok Promote can help you:
- Attract more users
- Reaching specific target user demographics
- Get new subscribers
- Get likes, reposts, comments
- Drive traffic to your site
Threadbeast, for example, promoted a raffle announcement video and lowered the purchase price by 13%.
Meanwhile, augmented reality app Wanna Kicks increased its demo video reach and received 75,000 app installs during the campaign.
By spending some money right in the app to promote your content, you can ensure that you get more views from real users. (On the other hand, paying for comments, likes, and followers from sketchy third-party sites is a very bad idea.)
The promotion feature obviously can’t promise that people will like what they see, but at least you’ll know they’ve seen it.
Reasons why TikTok might not approve your promotion
Just because you went through the not-so-rigorous six-step process to promote your video doesn’t mean TikTok will approve it.
Every promoted video needs to be reviewed before it appears in people’s feeds. If your campaign is not approved, it may be due to one of the following reasons:
- Your ad contains an exaggerated or misleading statement.
- The ad contains spelling or grammatical errors.
- Your ad uses capital letters or symbols instead of letters.
- Poor video, picture, or sound quality.
- The products or prices in your video do not match what you are actually selling.
- The website promoted by your video is down or does not comply with local laws.
- Your ad contains an unauthorized third-party logo
- Shocking, sexual, horror or graphic content
Source: TikTok
More information about TikTok’s advertising standards can be found here.
How to cancel a share on TikTok
Thinking about promoting your video? No problem. You can easily cancel your TikTok campaign.
This is similar to the TikTok Promote setting, but in reverse.
Just go to the promoted video, tap on the three dots in the bottom right corner and click “Close Promotion”.
You will only pay for the number of days your campaign actually ran.
Today we had a lot of fun learning how to use the promotion and remembering why I got banned from the Gap. But if you remember one thing about TikTok Promote, here’s the thing: Promotion is just a tool to expand your content’s reach; it cannot get people to like or interact with your video.
Connecting with your audience starts with great content. Learn more about creating TikTok videos with authentic impact here.