WJR Business Beat with Jeff Sloan: Time To Take TikTok Seriously For Your Small Business Marketing (Episode 278)

Good morning, Paul! Social media marketing is so fundamentally critical to small business success these days. In fact, it’s the primary way many small businesses get the word out to create awareness, to do branding, and to generate leads and sales. Well, this week Burrell Associates released a study measuring which social media platforms local ad agencies deemed to be very effective between April and June, 2021. Now while it was no surprise that Facebook, YouTube and Instagram occupied the first three slots, the findings also showed the TikTok has now moved up to the list and was cited as fourth most popular, rising above LinkedIn, Twitter, and the classic local-centric Yelp. By utilizing TikTok’s algorithm-based feed, unlike Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, which posts follower based feeds, brands and businesses can theoretically sign up for tick-tock, post a piece of content, and get a million views, says Corey Elliott, executive president of local market intelligence at Burrell. Pretty amazing, right? now, TikTok was once a social media platform made up primarily of kids, teenagers between 10 and 19 years.   But today, not anymore. TikTok now broadening its demographic profile to cover many aging people, covering demographics well beyond the teen years. And now with that broadening market TikTok looks to be a potential answer for a wide array of local advertisers and agencies trying to gain awareness digitally.   So there you have it, Paul, our bottom line, time to take TikTok seriously for your small business market.   I’m Jeff Sloan, founder and CEO of StartupNation.com, and that’s today’s Business Beat, on the Great Voice of the Great Lakes, WJR.