Since its launch, the TikTok social media app has taken hold of popular culture, inspired global trends, and catapulted everyday users into household names.
In June 2025, TikTok was the second-most-downloaded app worldwide, after ChatGPT, with 37 million downloads that month alone. So what’s all the fuss about? TikTok’s short video format and unpolished content make it a favorite among viewers, creators, and brands alike. The unique algorithm allows even small accounts to go viral on TikTok. Best of all, it’s easy to get started.
If you’ve downloaded TikTok and don’t know where to begin, you’re in the right place. Ahead, dig into the basics of setting up a TikTok account, learn to create videos with viral potential, engage with the TikTok community, and build your brand on the platform.
What is TikTok?
TikTok is a video-based social media platform that allows users to create videos that are as short as a second (though this may limit your reach) and as long as 10 minutes (if you record in the app) or 60 minutes for uploaded videos.
TikTok is built around audio clips and music, and features an extensive audio library for creating content that users can pull from—and even add to. Trending TikTok sounds often dominate popular videos and the For You page (FYP), the primary feed where users see new videos.
TikTok’s extensive features include filters, livestreams, Stories, tipping, and platform-specific options like Duets and Stitches. TikTok content tends to be less produced and more raw compared with other social media platforms, with users looking for authenticity from both creators and brands.
“TikTok really changed everything for me—for everyone,” Elavi cofounder Michelle Razavi shares on an episode of Shopify Masters. “You start to see more of this unfiltered, raw, vulnerable, off-the-cuff content. That was a breath of fresh air because I would spend so much time obsessing over the editing, lighting, making sure my face looked perfect—and I don’t have the time for that.”
For businesses and influencers, TikTok offers features to monetize and grow your brand. Open a TikTok Shop, join the platform’s Creator Rewards Program, or integrate TikTok with your ecommerce store to earn money from your content. Connect your Shopify store to your TikTok through an app and sync your products and manage your inventory.
How to use TikTok in 6 steps
- Set up a TikTok account
- Get to know TikTok
- Engage with the TikTok community
- Create TikTok video content
- Explore unique tools and features
- Sell on TikTok
Use these six steps as a guide for getting your brand started on TikTok:
1. Set up a TikTok account
To set up an account, find the TikTok app in either the Apple App Store or on Google Play, depending on your mobile phone. Tap “Download” to install TikTok on your phone.
Once downloaded, open the app and tap “Sign up.” You can sign up using a mobile number, an email address, Facebook, Google, or an Apple ID. The app will ask you for your birthday and your interests (this helps curate your For You page before you actually engage with content). Create a custom username and update your profile with a profile photo, bio, and links to your other social media pages.
2. Get to know TikTok
As soon as you’ve set up an account, the main home screen will show you the For You page. This is the platform’s central feed, which includes a curated mix of videos from users you follow, trending content, promoted videos, TikTok ads, and other content recommended for you based on your behavior on the platform.
The more you use the app, the more the algorithm will understand your likes and interests and show you related content.
Tap the magnifying glass in the top right corner to access TikTok search. You can explore results by hashtags, videos, users, and sounds. Follow popular users within your industry to get inspired by their content and pick up on TikTok trends.
3. Engage with the TikTok community
Engaging with the TikTok community will help you connect with others in your niche, get more followers, and tailor your For You page to your particular interests. Follow a mix of users from your target audience and engage with their videos. As you scroll, like, comment, share, or watch a video all the way through to let TikTok know what kind of content intrigues you.
Connect TikTok with other apps or allow it to see your contacts, and it will recommend friends to follow. You can also follow other brands in your industry to get inspiration or build your network.
4. Create TikTok video content
Now that you understand what content resonates with TikTok audiences, it’s time to learn how to create and post your own videos. Follow these basic steps to record and publish a TikTok video using native features in the app:
1. Open TikTok and tap “Create”, represented by a plus (+) symbol in the bottom navigation bar.
2. Scroll left to right to choose your video length (choose between 15 seconds, 60 seconds, and 10 minutes). The time you choose is the maximum length your video will be, but you can create something shorter. Tap the large red Record button at the bottom center, and choose the Record button again to end the video recording. You can also upload photos or videos rather than recording in the app, or use the template option.
3. Hit the red check mark to navigate to the edit screen and see your video in a loop. You will now be able to add filters, effects, text, captions (good for accessibility), and other features to your video before you publish.
4. Tap “Next” to add more details to your video, such as a caption, relevant hashtags, a video “cover” (a thumbnail to represent it in the feed), and tags of people or locations in the video.
5. You will also be able to restrict privacy and publish the video to only you, only friends, or everyone on TikTok. You can also toggle certain features on or off, controlling how other people can use your videos: Tap “More Options” to set restrictions for Duets, Stitches, and downloads.
6. You’re ready to post. You can now either save your TikTok video to drafts to post later or tap “Post” to make it live.
As you create content, find a posting cadence that allows you to publish content consistently. Learn about the best times to post on TikTok for guidance.
5. Explore unique tools and features
TikTok has some of the most robust creation tools among social media platforms. TikTok videos can become works of art thanks to plenty of sounds, filters, effects, and other features. Experiment with them to see what resonates with your audience:
- Duet. With the Duet feature, you record your own content while another video plays in a split screen.
- Stitch. The Stitch feature “stitches” up to five seconds of an existing video with your video response to create new content.
- Sound library. Tap the search icon to access a sound library with trending TikTok sounds, playlists, and the ability to search for a specific song or audio clip.
- Filters. TikTok’s preset filters enhance your content by adding a specific color, tone, animation, or contrast profile to change the mood or feel of the TikTok video.
- Effects. TikTok offers hundreds of Effects that you can use to create or enhance your video content. One example is the “my red flags” trend, which features three red flags above the user’s head. Each flips around slowly to reveal what the user’s red flags are, often surprising the poster, who doesn’t know what the results will be.
- Green screen. TikTok’s green screen works like green screen technology used in film for computer-generated imagery, a.k.a. CGI effects. This allows you to record a video of yourself talking with another image or video in the background.
- AI voice. TikTok’s text-to-speech function is a popular option for adding spoken content to your TikTok videos without using your own voice. You can choose from a library of AI voices.
6. Sell on TikTok
Consumers increasingly turn to social media channels over traditional search engines like Google for product discovery, with TikTok often cited as the best place to stumble upon your new favorite brand or a trending product. According to Emarketer, 23% of Gen Z audiences use TikTok to find new products.
The platform also has built-in shopping features, allowing brands to sell directly to fans through a shop tab, shoppable video content, and TikTok ads with embedded product links.
To take advantage of TikTok for ecommerce, sign up for a business account. Simply navigate to settings and toggle your personal account to a business account. This is a free service from TikTok that unlocks access to several business features like the Ads Manager and advanced analytics.
Sign up for TikTok Shop or integrate your existing Shopify ecommerce store with TikTok using the dedicated app. Use TikTok for business to help reach your target audience through TikTok marketing tactics like ads and catchy organic content.
Best practices for TikTok video creation
- Tap into your analytics
- Choose relevant topics and themes
- Test video length
- Upgrade the quality of your clips
- Maximize effects and editing tools
As you become more comfortable with the app and gain insight into what others are creating, work on helping your content stand out in the endless stream of videos:
1. Tap into your analytics
As you learn how to use TikTok effectively to grow your account or meet business goals, you’ll find the analytics feature helpful in determining what content works and what doesn’t. With a TikTok For Business account, you’ll have access to more robust analytics. To view your analytics, tap the menu in the top right corner (three horizontal lines), open the business suite, and then tap “Analytics.”
Here are a few metrics to monitor:
- Post views. Reveals how many times your video has been watched, pointing to its reach.
- Profile views. Tracks how often users visit your TikTok profile, showing interest in your presence on the platform.
- Likes. Measures audience appreciation and agreement with your content.
- Comments. Shows direct engagement and which posts spark chatter.
- Shares. Reflects the virality of your content and how compelling viewers find it. This can also point to the utility and helpfulness of your content.
- Your top posts. Highlights your best-performing content.
- Total viewers. Represents your overall audience size across all videos.
- New viewers. Tracks account growth and your content appeal to first-time viewers.
- Viewer insights. Provides demographic data about your audience, including age, gender, and location.
- Most active times. Helps optimize your posting schedule for maximum impact and engagement.
2. Choose relevant topics and themes
To choose the right topics, analyze your best-performing content across all platforms, conduct keyword research specific to TikTok, and regularly engage with your audience through comments and DMs to understand their interests and pain points.
Cookware brand Our Place has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers with a diverse range of videos, from unboxing new products to recipe tutorials featuring its pans, and sit-downs with its founder and CEO, Shiza Shahid. While the brand experiments with trending formats and popular sounds, there’s a consistent thread running through all its content: celebrating the joy of coming together to enjoy delicious meals.
For instance, during Black History Month, Our Place collaborated with cooking content creator Nikki Jenkins to prepare jambalaya, as she explained its connection to African American culinary heritage. This TikTok video presented Our Place’s products while demonstrating cultural awareness and providing educational value, aligning perfectly with its brand ethos.
3. Test video length
Look at competitors in your space to gauge typical video lengths that resonate with your shared audience. Dive into your TikTok analytics, paying close attention to watch time and engagement rates across different video durations. Experiment with various lengths—you might be surprised to find it’s your longer videos that perform well. Let the data guide your strategy, adjusting your approach based on what your specific audience responds to best.
Both long and short videos have their advantages. A longer video lets you provide deeper storytelling, but a shorter video can allow you to be more creative. Take jewelry brand Mejuri. It garnered more than 100,000 likes on a creative video concept that showcased different earring combinations in less than eight seconds.
4. Upgrade the quality of your clips
While TikTok has a more casual and laid-back vibe than many other social platforms, quality still matters. Posting clips with fuzzy visuals or uploading videos with muffled audio can make people scroll past your content. Fortunately, even tiny optimizations can elevate your videos, making them more compelling as they pop up in the For You feed. According to TikTok, “creators who post high-quality content see follower growth over 40 times greater than with other posts.”
Here are some tips to consider:
- Shoot in HD. Ensure your video is clear and crisp, allowing viewers to fully appreciate the details in your content. Most newer phones have more than enough functionality to achieve this.
- Use a good mic. Invest in a quality microphone or use your phone’s external mic for clearer audio, especially in noisy environments.
- Account for lighting. Natural light or a simple ring light can dramatically improve the visual quality of your videos.
- Stabilize your shots. Use a tripod or gimbal to prevent shaky footage and create a more refined look.
- Frame your shots thoughtfully. Pay attention to composition, ensuring the person you’re filming or the product you’re shooting is properly centered.
5. Maximize effects and editing tools
TikTok’s arsenal of built-in effects and editing tools can transform a simple clip into a scroll-stopping masterpiece. From green screen wizardry to time-bending transitions, these features aren’t just gimmicks—they’re powerful storytelling devices that can amplify your brand’s message and captivate your audience. Whether you’re showcasing products, sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses, or jumping on the latest trend, using these tools strategically can set your content apart in the fast-moving For You feed.
Ruggable, a company that sells machine-washable rugs, features a design expert using the green screen effect in its video about how to style Pantone’s 2025 color of the year. The backgrounds change to different home interiors as the clip progresses. The video offers helpful advice about how to incorporate the color into your home.
While TikTok’s native editing features are robust, many creators and brands turn to off-platform tools like CapCut to elevate their content. These external editing apps offer advanced capabilities, like multilayer editing and professional-grade color grading, along with a library of templates, allowing you to create distinctive videos to upload to TikTok.
Sofa Club, an ecommerce furniture company, used a CapCut template to cheekily transition a video of a gorilla into one of its gray couches from their Clapham range. The video was a hit, garnering more than 774,000 likes and over 8,000 comments, many pointing to the cleverness of the edit.
Tips for building a TikTok community
- Engage with followers
- Collaborate with other brands
- Participate in challenges and trends
- Partner with influencers
On a platform where authenticity is key, building community will get you further than simply pushing out polished marketing messages. Here are four tips for building your community:
1. Engage with followers
Take the time to respond to comments with thoughtful answers to questions and gratitude for the support. Browse through TikTok for user-generated content (UGC) that mentions or tags your brand.
In the early days of your TikTok presence, these relationship-building interactions should be manageable and not too time-consuming with a small audience. However, as you grow, find ways to scale this engagement. Consider:
- Putting aside an hour per day to respond to comments, repost content, and interact under creator videos
- Setting a budget for messaging creators who have mentioned your products and sending them PR packages, no strings attached
- Going live on TikTok to interact with many followers at once, answering questions and building community in real time
- Responding to questions with a dedicated video, giving your followers a tailored and personal response
Luxy Hair, a hair extensions brand, received a comment under a video about one of its latest products: “I want to see you place one and cover in real time please.” Its video response does exactly that, featuring creator Lindsay Borow applying the Scalp Hair Fill-Ins product to her hair over the length of the video.
The return on investment (ROI) of these activities can be hard to measure, but the long-term benefits of building a loyal, engaged community often outweigh the short-term pressure on resources. “I still to this day answer as many DMs as I can,” Set Active founder Lindsey Carter says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “I think being able to feel connected to me as a founder makes people feel special.”
Lindsey sees her personal social media involvement as key to Set Active’s success. “You can’t fake authenticity and you can’t fake community.”
2. Collaborate with other brands
Consider collaborating with complementary brands on TikTok to expand your audience and build trust. For example, tinned seafood company Fishwife collaborated with Churn, which sells a variety of European-style butters, to create anchovy and lemon butter. Both brands posted about the collaboration on their TikTok accounts, giving them visibility across each other’s audiences.
Start interacting with complementary brands and see where the platform’s organic connections and opportunities take you.
3. Participate in challenges and trends
Challenges and trends are the lifeblood of TikTok, offering creators a chance to flex their creativity within the constraints of a familiar template. As a business, it might be tempting to stick rigidly to your brand guidelines and post the polished content you use on other platforms. However, embracing TikTok’s trends can be the most effective way for people to connect with your brand on a more personal level.
Plus, the algorithm tends to favor content that follows these trends, potentially boosting your visibility. By participating in popular challenges, you demonstrate your brand’s ability to stay current and engage with the TikTok community authentically.
Luggage brand Béis participated in the Group 7 trend. Musician Sophia James started the trend by posting seven consecutive videos to determine which would get the most reach. The video that showed up on your FYP became your “group.” From there, the trend took off with creators posting about their groups—Group 7 in particular. Béis posted its own take on the trend, explaining that Group 7 just means you have to wait for Groups 1 to 6 before boarding a plane.
Being authentic on TikTok doesn’t mean jumping on every trend or challenge. Instead, it involves finding ways to create and interact through videos that genuinely align with your brand, feel organic, and connect you with your ideal audience.
4. Partner with influencers
You can gain video reach by knowing who to partner with to promote your brand. Creators drive six times more shares than brands on TikTok, according to Dash Social.
Perfume brand Dossier understood the importance of engaging with influencers to promote its products. To make this a reality, it hired a team to scour TikTok and find the right ones.
“Their job is to go on TikTok, find the influencers, reach out to them, send them perfumes, strike an agreement with them, and then just continue working with them, and really having them as trusted partners of the company,” says Sergio Tacher, founder and CEO of Dossier, in an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.
Dossier shared one video with fashion influencer Jane as she spritzed her way through Paris.
Being involved in your community can also help you identify the popular voices in your niche. There are a few ways to engage with influencers:
- TikTok affiliate marketing. Provide creators with unique discount codes or links to track the sales they generate. This allows for performance-based partnerships where creators earn commissions on successful conversions.
- Influencer campaign agreements. Arrange short-term collaborations where creators produce content featuring your products or services.
- Brand ambassador programs. Establish a formal program where select creators consistently represent your brand over an extended period. This can include exclusive previews, special events, and regular features in your brand’s content.
- Long-term partnerships. Develop ongoing relationships with creators, potentially involving them in product development or creating a branded line. This deeper collaboration can lead to more authentic promotion and stronger brand alignment.
If you run a small business with a limited budget, consider working with micro-influencers—those with smaller but highly engaged followings of less than 100,000 fans.
These creators often have authentic connections with their audience and can offer excellent value for niche markets or local businesses. For instance, a local vegan bakery might partner with a micro-influencer who’s known for their plant-based lifestyle content in the area, reaching a highly targeted audience of potential customers in the process.
From dance app to brand-builder
TikTok has evolved from a quirky dance app into a powerful platform where businesses can build community, drive sales, and connect with audiences in authentic ways. The beauty of TikTok lies in its accessibility—anyone can start creating compelling content with just a smartphone and a bit of creativity, regardless of budget or experience. Jump in, experiment with the platform’s robust features, and remember that the most successful TikTok strategies balance trend participation with genuine brand personality.
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How to use TikTok FAQ
What is TikTok and how does it work?
TikTok is a social media app that allows users to create their own short videos and share them publicly with other users. Popular formats like the Duet video feature and hashtag challenges help content spread, inspiring viral trends.
What is TikTok mainly used for?
TikTok is mainly used for creating and sharing short videos that often feature music, comedy, lip-syncing, and dancing. Brands can get in on the action by including trending audio clips, pop culture trends, and hashtag challenges.
Is TikTok easy to use?
TikTok is easy to use once you learn its features. You can start by posting an original video with no added effects, then work up to using more advanced options like the green screen.
How does TikTok work for beginners?
TikTok is easy to set up for beginners. Simply download the app, find topics of interest using the search bar, like and comment on your favorite videos to train the algorithm, and start posting videos of your own.
How do you use TikTok effectively?
As with any other social media channel, using TikTok effectively means understanding your audience and the type of content that resonates with them. Focus on authentic content designed for a target audience, pay attention to trends, and use analytics to hone your content.
What are the drawbacks of TikTok for businesses?
TikTok marketing has many benefits for businesses, but one drawback is that the app has faced bans in the US. With TikTok’s future uncertain, some businesses have turned to TikTok alternatives.
