Since it was founded in 2016, TikTok has seen a phenomenal boom in popularity among Gen Z and millennial users, and has had a tremendous influence on the formats used on other content platforms like YouTube and Instagram.
If you’re looking to build your profile as a creator on Tiktok, or want to use TikTok content as a marketing asset to support your business, then familiarising yourself with some of the best TikTok editors on the platform can be a great way to find inspiration and maximise engagement with your audience.
In this post, we’ll take a look at what makes four popular TikTok creators so successful, and some key lessons you can apply to promoting your own content. 🚀
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American lifestyle blogger Emily Mariko boasts 12 million followers, earned through her mouth-watering foodie content. The bulk of Emily’s content is centred around farmer’s market shopping trips where she buys a variety of quality natural ingredients, as well as simple recipes where she shows her followers how to turn those hauls into delicious meals.
Though TikTok is brimming with foodie content creators, Emily Mariko has set herself apart from the crowd by keeping her content markedly simple and accessible. Instead of clustering all her videos around a narrow niche like vegan-friendly or healthy foods, Emily Mariko sticks to a philosophy of using simple ingredients for familiar and widely-loved dishes. 🧡
TikTok creators can take a page out of this creator’s book by making the tone of their content approachable and authentic, without over-saturating videos with extra features.
David Zinn is a former illustrator who’s turned his attention to wholesome chalk street art, work that he shares with the world through a TikTok account with some 3 million followers.
Using worn brick walls, old manhole covers, and cracks in the pavement as his canvas, David’s art has helped inspire dozens of other street artists and delighted countless TikTok users. 🔥
Aside from combining chalk illustration with urban environments for a distinctly unique video format, David Zinn’s content has a distinctly soothing quality in the way he injects fun and colour into drab, everyday environments. Though David’s an undoubtedly skillful artist, the charm and simplicity of his work makes his content easy viewing and highly accessible to a large, diverse audience.
Arianna, posting as @arilekhraj, expertly demonstrates how TikTok creators can build an impressive following by combining two content niches into something new and refreshing.
Her charming “dinner and a movie” content segments show her choosing a sealed envelope to reveal the name of a movie, combined with a themed recipe. Her videos then show her preparing the meal, often with friends from her college dorm, before settling down with her tasty creations in front of the movie from the envelope.
Arianna’s content shows great awareness for her target demographic of young women without the videos straying into being too aspirational. Aside from this, her creative content format shows how TikTok creators can take two niches that are popular to the point of being played-out (food and movie content), and create something completely new to stand out from the crowd. 😉
Mikki Tenazas has risen to be one of the most popular and well-known travel creators on TikTok through a combination of breathtaking international adventures and suave lifestyle content.
Tenazas is based in the Philippines but is something of a global citizen, and has posted content from a vast spread of international destinations, from picturesque beaches in the Maldives to quaint and cosy summerhouses in scandinavia.
The success of @mgtenazas is founded on one key distinguishing feature: he shows us things that we simply can’t access in our day to day lives. You may not have the means to visit all the exotic locations that Mikki Tenazas does. However, if you follow his philosophy and try to focus your TikTok content on things that only you can offer the app’s users, you’ll find it easy to carve out a distinct niche and drive engagement from your audience. 🔥
How to Create Great TikTok Content and Grow Your Following
Now that you’ve seen how other creators stand out from the noise and build an engaged following, let’s look at some of the best strategies and methods you can use to take the inspiration you find and turn it into your own runaway success on TikTok.
Put a Lot of Time and Effort Into Your First Few Videos
One of the most common mistakes made by TikTok content creators is launching straight into producing content without taking the time to carefully plan their debut on the platform.
TikTok’s algorithm will boost the first few posts on any new account in order to give new creators a chance to find their audience and avoid getting lost in a sea of more established TikTok creators. It’s important not to waste this opportunity, so take your time to research the kind of content you’re planning to focus on, and make sure that your account has a strong debut you can build on for future success.
Learn How to Edit
Captions, subtitles, and after-effects are all staples of great TikTok creators, especially when it comes to tutorial videos and accounts that share interesting facts. 🙂
To ensure your content is as polished as possible, make sure you take some time to research how to implement popular effects like cuts, zooms, and transitions. To get started, we recommend researching TikTok creators you admire in the same niche you’re planning to target, and making a list of all the editing techniques that could enhance your content. This will give you a more structured learning curve as you figure out how to get your own content up to a professional standard.
Some new creators think that making their videos appear polished and professional requires specialised expensive tools, but there’s a great market of affordable and easy-to-use editing tools made specifically for short-form video content, like our own AI-powered Submagic platform.
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Have a Hook at the Start
TikTok’s USP is its focus on short-form content, and the users who see your content aren’t going to be looking for a long, detailed video.
With the speed at which users can lose interest and scroll to the next video, it’s essential to tease your audience in the first few seconds with a strong hook, by asking the viewer an interesting question, using a compelling visual as the thumbnail, or having some kind of suspenseful captions overlaying the video.
When you’re coming up with hooks, just bear in mind that every hook you add to your TikTok content should have some kind of satisfying pay-off. Hooks in the first few seconds are a staple of TikTok content, and accounts which repeatedly deceive viewers as a way of getting them to watch to the end will only serve to annoy their audience. 😉
Use a Steady Camera and Well-Lit Environments
One of the best things about TikTok is that it lends itself naturally to smartphone-filmed video content, and the audience on the platform will expect to see production values that they can recreate at home. This has even led to big companies with huge content budgets filming ads in a TikTok-esque style to make their brand more approachable.
However, while your content doesn’t have to look like a Hollywood movie, it’s important to put some effort into the production quality and avoid letting the finished content look too amateur.
Facing a window is a good way to give your video natural, even lighting that will help people view your content the way it was intended. For filming when the weather isn’t so sunny, getting an affordable ring light is a good way to supplement your ambient lighting and make sure users can pick up every detail.
In the same vein, it’s important to make sure your camera is steady during filming, as constant movement and “shaky cam” is a clear marker of amateur production quality. Avoid filming with the camera in your hand, and use a selfie stick or tripod for a steadier and more aesthetically-pleasing result.
Don’t Forget Hashtags!
Hashtags don’t have as strong of an influence on TikTok visibility as with some other social media platforms, but they still play a role in helping the algorithm understand what your content is all about, and allowing users to discover you.
Though the right approach to Tiktok hashtags varies from one account to the next, some of the ways you can make better use of hashtags include:
- Keeping up-to-date on the rising and falling popularity of hashtags that don’t have a specific focus.
- Researching new hashtags being used in your content niche and employing them before they become oversaturated by competing content creators.
- Using a mix of hashtags that have widespread mainstream popularity, and more niche ones that are only relevant to your specific content focus. This will help you expand into new audience segments while maintaining a good relationship with your direct audience.
- Limiting the number of hashtags to around 4-6 to avoid making your posts seem too spammy, or losing the sense of focus that will help you connect with your audience.
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