7 Places Where You Can Amplify Influencer Content

Expand your amplification strategy. Expand your campaign reach.

Most brands spend the majority of their amplification efforts on Meta-owned properties Facebook and Instagram (and if you need some tips on Facebook amplification, we have those), but there are a number of platforms that allow amplification:

1) TikTok

Brands on TikTok can amplify and whitelist influencer content to run as video ads. They can also boost brand-posted content to target audiences.

2) Pinterest

While Pinterest doesn’t support the option to whitelist influencer content at the moment, brands can run photo, video, shopping, and carousel Pins as ads.

3) Twitter

Twitter’s Promoted Ads feature allows brands to promote Tweets to specific audiences (these Tweets don’t have to show up on the brand’s profile). Brands can also whitelist Influencer content to create Promoted Ads that appear from the influencer’s handle.

4) Snapchat

Snapchat supports a number of advertising options, including pre- and mid-roll ads, branded filters and lenses, story ads, and catalogs. 

5) LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides a number of advertising options, including image, video, carousel, and event ads, as well as message ads and pre-filled forms for lead generation. 

6) YouTube

YouTube allows brands to run pre-roll and mid-roll video ads.

7) Hulu

Hulu has recently launched the Beta for their self-service advertising platform, allowing brands to set target audiences and market video content during Hulu content ad breaks.

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Now that you know where you can amplify influencer content, let’s work together to strategize your next influencer marketing campaign. Get in touch with us here.

TikTok Analytics, Explained

Brands can no longer ignore TikTok when it comes to influencer marketing. The platform’s unmatched algorithm presents a unique opportunity for content to go viral and reach millions of potential consumers, and TikTok creators are savvy about developing engaging video content that converts viewership to patronage.

Whether you’re launching a TikTok account for your brand or simply working with influencers on the platform to create branded content, you’ll want to understand TikTok’s available analytics and how to interpret them in order to perfect your TikTok marketing strategy. So let’s break down everything TikTok analytics!

How To Access TikTok Analytics

First thing’s first: how do you access TikTok analytics?

You’ll need a Creator or Business Account on TikTok (don’t worry, it’s free) to view analytics. Head’s up: you’ll only be able to access analytics for content after you sign up for a professional account, so go ahead, visit your settings, and switch ASAP so you’ll have access to metrics.

Now that you have your Creator or Business Account set up, go to Settings > Creator/Business Tools > Analytics, and you’ll be greeted with your Analytics overview.

Understanding Your Analytics Dashboard

There are 4 main tabs under your analytics: Overview, Content, Followers, and LIVE. Each tab provides important data for you to understand your account performance. Let’s take a deeper dive:

Overview

Overview shows the overarching trends of your account analytics over a given period of time (the default is “Last 7 Days”, but you can also view “Last 28 Days”, “Last 60 Days”, or enter a custom date range), including:

Engagement: how many times audiences are viewing and interacting with your account’s content *click the arrow to view this data represented in graph format*

1. Video Views: the total number of times all videos on your account were viewed

2. Profile Views: the number of times your profile was viewed

3. Likes: how many likes videos on your account have received

4. Comments: how many comments have been left on your videos

5. Shares: how many times your videos have been shared

Followers: how many followers your account has, including net gains

Content: how many TikToks you have published during the set time frame 

Live: how many Live sessions you have hosted over the set time frame

Content

This is where you can see view numbers for recent posts and also find your Trending Videos.

The Video Posts section is pretty self-explanatory; it shows you all the videos you’ve posted in the past 7 days, their view numbers, and compares your number of posts to the previous 7 day period.

Below you’ll find the Trending Videos section, which is really valuable for you to understand what content of yours is performing best. This section shows the top 9 videos with the fastest growth in view numbers over the past 7 days.

How to use this data: Take a look at these videos and try to identify any trends or commonalities: maybe a certain topic you’re posting about is performing really well, or perhaps you started a trend that’s garnering a lot of engagement. Look at your popular videos and lean into that content!

Followers

This tab is where you can access demographics on your followers, as well as how your followers interact with other TikTok content.

First, you’ll see your follower count and growth rate over the past week. You can use this and the Followers information from the Overview tab to track increases in following.

Below, you’ll see a pie chart illustrating the gender of your followers.

Below that, you’ll see a percentage breakdown of where your followers are from, by country. Pro tip: Depending on where your followers are from, you may want to consider ensuring your content is accessible and relatable to international audiences (for example, adding translated captions if you have a large international following).

Further down, you’ll see Follower Activity that shows when your followers are most active on the platform, both by hour and by day.

Pro tip: this data is all recorded in UTC, so adjust for your time zone to understand when the best posting times are for your audience. (And if we’re being honest, we wouldn’t worry too much about posting at specific optimized times, as TikTok’s algorithm boosts content old and new alike to the “For You Page”).

LIVE

This tab specifically shares analytics regarding live stream content on TikTok. You have the option to view data for LIVE sessions either over the past 7 days or the past 28 days.

First, you’ll be provided with an overview of LIVE video data, including the number of LIVE videos hosted, the total number of views, new followers, total time of LIVE videos, and top viewer count.

Below that, you’ll also see how many unique viewers have watched your LIVE videos at least once.

Last, you’ll see how many “diamonds” (aka digital gifts viewers can send you during LIVE videos that can be redeemed for money) you’ve earned during LIVE videos.

Viewing Individual Video Analytics

Now that you have a better understanding of your account analytics, let’s talk analytics for specific videos!

To view your video’s analytics, click on your video and click the 3 dots on the lower right corner. One of your options will be “Analytics”, so go ahead and click that. You’ll now be able to see your video’s performance.

At the top, you’ll see 4 icons with numbers below each: a play button, a heart, a comment bubble, and an arrow:

The play button represents the total number of views the video has received.

The heart represents how many likes the video has received.

The comment bubble represents how many comments have been made under your video.

The arrow represents how many times the video has been shared (which includes link copies and DM shares).

The next section displays total play time (in hours), total views, the percentage of viewers who watched the full video, reached audience, and average watch time.

Pro tip: Average watch time is one of the most important metrics on TikTok and can make or break a video’s frequency on the FYP. A short average watch time means that viewers aren’t interested enough in the video’s content to watch through to the end, while a high one means your video is doing a great job keeping people engaged. Make note of your videos with high average watch times vs. low ones, and strategize different ways of getting information across if you’re seeing consistently low watch times.

The next section showcases traffic source types, meaning where your content is being seen on the app. Your viewers can find your videos from the following sources:

For You

Personal Profile

Following

Sound

Search

Hashtag

The last section shows audience territories for your specific video; in other words, where your viewers are from. 

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Now that you have a better understanding of TikTok’s analytics, you can now interpret content performance both from your brand’s account and from influencer partners and create a successful future TikTok strategy.

Have more questions about TikTok or interested in running a TikTok influencer campaign? Lytehouse can answer your questions.

4 Ways To Create Campaigns That Break Through The Noise

The pool of influencers has never been bigger, but that also means the competition for eyeballs is fiercer than ever before.

This means that the standard one-and-done Instagram post approach to influencer marketing is not going to have the same effect that it did just a few years ago.

So, what content will cut through the noise in 2021?

1) Embrace Long-Term Partnerships

For one, long-term partnerships are going to help you tell a story through weeks or even months. According to the popular “Rule of 7”, people need to see an ad interact with a brand 7 times before they remember it, so seeing an influencer speak about a product once and then never again probably isn’t going to have much of an impact on converting those views to customers. On the other hand, if an influencer constantly mentions a brand month after month, followers are more likely to remember the brand, take it into consideration, and finally purchase the product. By incorporating repetition into your influencer marketing strategy, you increase the likelihood for an influencer’s followers to translate into customers.

2) Lean Into Relevant Trends

Social media apps from Instagram to TikTok to Twitter thrive on trending content and viral hits. Creators hop aboard popular sounds and hashtags to make their content discoverable, taking trending formats and making them their own. When it makes sense for brands to do so, they can also join in on viral trends and give it their own branded spin.

Take Nathan Apodaca’s insanely popular TikTok video of him skateboarding while drinking a jug of Ocean Spray cranberry juice while Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” plays. The video was viewed over 78 million times, spawned countless remakes, and even got multiple Fleetwood Mac band members to join TikTok to talk about the unexpected reemergence of their 1977 hit. When clothing brand KJP put a preppy autumnal spin on Apodaca’s video, they received over 5 million views. KJP’s take on the “Dreams” video worked because they tied it into their brand personality and made it their own (in this iteration, the skateboarder is wearing one of KJP’s pumpkin sweaters and has a carved pumpkin head; the cranberry juice is replaced with a preppy classic, a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte). The organic plug of Ocean Spray came full circle for Apodaca, too: Ocean Spray turned Apodaca’s video into an official #DreamsChallenge trend and also gifted him with a brand new truck (plus all the cranberry juice he could ask for).

3) Capitalize On Authentic Moments

Which brings us to another opportunity for innovative marketing: take advantage of authentic moments in the space when you see them. When TikTok’s biggest star Charli D’Amelio was constantly sipping iced Dunkin’ Donuts drinks in her popular dance videos, Dunkin’ saw the opportunity to partner with D’Amelio and created “The Charli”, a signature drink that fans could order at Dunkin’ locations. Because the partnership stemmed out of D’Amelio’s natural love of the coffee, it proved to be a major success. It also required minimal effort on Dunkin’s part, as they didn’t need to develop a new product, just market Charli’s signature order.

Other food companies have taken this approach in recent months, like McDonald’s with the Travis Scott meal. With both of these campaigns, the brands noticed natural affinities and transformed those into official partnerships, and because D’Amelio and Scott were already fans of Dunkin’ and McDonald’s respectively, their audiences saw these partnerships as natural progressions rather than disingenuous, money-motivated collaborations. 

4) Do It For The Meme

Similar to capitalizing on trending content, Instagram itself declared 2020 the Year of the Meme. Their year-end review highlighted the most popular memes that took the Internet by storm last year, from the Dolly Parton Challenge to Tiger King to relatable jokes about working from home in quarantine. Such memes succeeded on Instagram not only because they were witty and clever, but because they were inherently sharable. Shares and saves have become increasingly valuable analytics to monitor on Instagram and other social media platforms, and we suggest this be one of your key metrics to focus on when developing your social media content strategy.

Take the recent proliferation of Bernie Sanders memes: one iconic photo of the Vermont senator donning his favorite Burton jacket and a pair of hand-knit mittens sitting by himself at President Biden’s inauguration became an instantly viral meme that flooded the internet in record time. Here he is, joining the cast of Sex and the City as the fourth member now that Samantha isn’t returning for the reboot. Here he is with fellow meme icon Guy Fieri. In fact, one man even created a website where you could insert an inauguration Bernie into any photo you desire, should inspiration for a meme strike (and over 9 million photos were created on the site in the week that it was live). Or you can transform yourself into the mittens-wearing senator with an Instagram Story filter. You get the idea.

As a case study, the Bernie Sanders memes encapsulates so much about the content that succeeds in 2021: it tied into a timely event, was easy to transform and turn into a trend where everyone could add their own spin on the image, created for hilarious memes that were highly shareable, and the image itself was incredibly relatable. Who among us hasn’t felt like a curmudgeonly old man looking moderately annoyed with everything after this past year? 

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Gone are the days of obsessing over magazine-quality photography and vague three-word captions. Social media users want content that is sharable, saveable, and relatable; in other words, content that educates, entertains, and inspires. With every new social media post and influencer campaign in 2021, ask yourself how each piece of content is achieving one of these 3 main goals and you’ll see your brand grow and foster a community of its own.

For more on the latest social media trends and where the influencer marketing industry is heading, download our State Of Influencer Marketing 2021 report. 

Using Instagram Reels and TikTok Strategically

It was only a matter of time before a competitor came for TikTok. In early August, Instagram launched their competitor feature, Instagram Reels, and with the future of TikTok unclear, digital marketers and creators alike are asking how to use the two apps strategically.

Like TikTok, Instagram Reels allows users to upload 15-second videos set to music with easy-to-navigate editing tools that make it a breeze to film content without ever leaving the app. Both apps also feature a scrolling feed of videos (on TikTok, the For You Page; on Instagram Reels, the Discover Tab) that make it easy to discover content from new creators, not just the ones you are already following.

While Instagram Reels lacks some of the features that TikTok possesses (videos can’t be longer than 30 seconds at the time of writing this, and the analytics of Reels are practically nonexistent at the moment) it is clear to see why so many people are referring to TikTok and Reels as twins.

However, there is a major difference between TikTok and Instagram Reels that alters how users interact with each app and the video content that is shared: user demographics.

Gen-Z vs. Millennials: Who Do You Want To Reach?

TikTok has grown in popularity with Millennial and older generations in recent months, but the majority of their user base is Gen-Z, with almost half of users between the ages of 18 and 24. Instagram’s usership, however, skews toward Millennial audiences, with 33% of users falling between the ages of 25 to 34.

Depending on your target demographics, you may want to prioritize one app over the other. Entertainment, affordable fashion & beauty, and fast food brands have found great success marketing to teen and young adult audiences on TikTok, whereas brands with an older target audience will find that more millennials still prefer Instagram as their main social media platform. Determining who you want to reach on social media and which platforms they use the most will help you plan how much to invest in TikTok vs. Instagram Reels content.

Think Of TikTok As An Experimental Playground

Another way to utilize TikTok is to think of it as a great place to experiment with new types of content. Because the app is newer and the way their discovery algorithm displays videos to both people who follow you and people that TikTok thinks will like your content, each and every video theoretically has the potential to go viral. The better your content performs initially, the more times it will appear on people’s For You Pages.

Since a video could be shown to thousands regardless of your follower number, TikTok is a great place to try trends, experiment with new content, and test out what users respond to best. It is normal for some videos to perform better than others, so there is less pressure for every single piece of content to perform.

Use Analytics To Support What You Post On Instagram Reels

An easy way to get the most bang for your buck with content creation is to share videos across both TikTok and Instagram Reels. However, you should think strategically about what videos to share from TikTok to Reels and vice versa. Use the analytics you have on your Instagram account (need a refresher on interpreting analytics? Here’s an explainer) and think about the types of content that your audience responds to best on Instagram. From there, you can curate the videos you re-share to Reels.

For example, a nail polish brand may get thousands of views on TikTok for their take on a popular dance trend, but that trend may not make sense to Instagram’s audience. Despite performing well on TikTok, that video may not be best to reshare on Reels. However, nail art videos may have previously performed well on Instagram, so it’s likely that nail art Reels will also resonate with your audience.

Reels should be seen as another extension of your brand’s Instagram persona. In the same way that Instagram Stories allowed brands to share more “relatable” content that tied back to the brand’s tone and voice on their feed, Reels should be used as another way to create content that ties in to your brand’s social media identity.  

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No matter which platform you lean into more with your social media strategy, Lytehouse can help you perfect your content and match you with influencers to create engaging Reels and TikToks on your behalf.

Dear Brands: It’s a Good Time to Engage in TikTok

Content trends are cyclical. When Instagram first launched, its purpose as a platform was to showcase instant moments to your friends. It didn’t take long before the platform was used by creatives to showcase their portfolios of highly edited and curated content. Brands jumped on board because that platform allowed for larger and controlled distribution opportunities for editorial content, something brands were already creating and understood the value of.

Fast forward to today, when influencers are taking a step back and showing more ‘real’ content shot in the moment on their smartphones. Without a need for professional cameras and hired photographers, the influencer space has evolved to be about showcasing personality and vulnerability. With this shift, brands have — to no surprise — jumped on board.

Take TikTok, for instance. The content on the platform takes the ‘real’ and pushes it forward even further. The audience truly feels like they’re just hanging out with creators, a relationship that is much harder to earn on other platforms. The audience doesn’t need to feel like a voyeur: they truly feel like they’re just part of the gang, or at least as close to the gang as you could be, almost like you moved into the Hype House.

When considering a TikTok campaign for your brand, it’s important to note that the content will be more off-the-cuff, potentially humorous, and very in the moment. Perhaps for the first time in your brand’s evolution, it’ll have to let its guard down about standards. This doesn’t mean that the content will be poor, but the spectrum of expectations will need to broaden. The creators you activate on TikTok know their audience best and what’s been gaining them the most traction on the platform. Within reason, let creators take your brand along with them to effectively engage their audience. Finally, while the viral potential is huge, the audience is not targeted and not much tracking data is available… yet. Use this time to be an early adopter and trust established TikTok creators; see what works for your brand and constantly explore how it can be creatively conveyed on the emerging platform.

Beca Alexander

Founder & President

Should You Be Advertising On TikTok?

Whenever a new social media app grows in popularity, brands are quick to ask, “Should we invest in marketing on this platform?” For every Instagram success story, there are dozens of apps that fizzle out quickly, but one trending app that we think will only continue to grow is TikTok. Beyond just popularlizing Kombucha Girl or dancing cat videos, TikTok is increasingly becoming a new space for brands to advertise.

We’re breaking down what TikTok is, who is using the app, and the types of brands that should consider adding TikTok to their social media strategy in 2020.

What is TikTok?

TikTok describes itself as “the leading destination for short-form mobile video”. Most commonly compared to defunct video app Vine, TikTok allows users to upload short, 15-second clips to their feed, usually featuring music from the app’s vast library of songs. Similar to Snapchat and Instagram Stories, users can add fun filters and effects to their videos.

There is a tremendous ability to “go viral” on the platform since the app’s home feed prioritizes popular videos. Trends, memes, and challenges rule the platform.

Who is on the platform?

TikTok is most popular amongst Gen Z audiences, with 41% of active users between the ages of 16 and 24. It also has a female-skewing audience, making the app a big draw for fashion and beauty brands in particular.

How can brands market on TikTok?

As with any popular social media platform, brands are excited to find ways to advertise on the app. Currently, there are a few different ways that brands can advertise on TikTok:

In-Feed Ads: Just like ads can cut between stories on Snapchat and Instagram, brands can create in-feed ads that run in between TikTok posts.

Hashtag Challenge: Brands can sponsor a Hashtag Challenge to encourage users to create content, usually around some sort of dance or stunt. Chipotle recently hosted a #GuacDance challenge in celebration of National Avocado Day and saw over 250,000 video submissions on TikTok.

Brand Takeover: Another way brands can activate on the app is to take over the TikTok homepage. Your brand’s logo and call to action appear as soon as users open the app, as Grubhub tried out recently.

Branded Stickers & Filters: Similar to other social media apps, brands can also create custom stickers and filters around a certain event or product.

Influencer Marketing: TikTok influencers are growing in popularity and brands are taking notice, partnering with popular users on sponsored content.

What types of brands will succeed on the app?

Because the majority of TikTok users are in their teens and early twenties, high price items like luxury goods probably won’t succeed on the platform. Likewise, products aimed towards older consumers should not expect a strong return on investment advertising on the app.

Lower price items in categories that are important to teens, like food, beauty, fashion, and entertainment, will find greater success on TikTok. If your brand is targeting the Gen Z audience, you should highly consider focusing advertising efforts on TikTok.