Struggling to come up with TikTok ideas? Wondering how to consistently create content with minimal effort? Today, we have six tips for creating TikTok content when you’re pressed for time. You’ll discover how to make the content creation process most efficient for you to avoid burnout and how to focus on making sales, instead of just viral videos. Plus, you’ll learn some key things to keep in mind when planning, creating, and repurposing your TikToks!
Tip 1: The Answer Is the Question
Any time that you’re coming up with TikTok ideas and creating content, think about this: “What question am I answering with this video?” It can be really easy to get caught up on trends or sounds. But we’re not just going for virality here. We are going for making money in sales. So, how can you create trust, visibility, credibility, and most importantly – sales – by answering the question that is generally on your customer’s mind?
So think about what are the top five questions you get about your service and product? Or about the way that you deal with your customers and what it’s like to work with you? Jot it down and these could be your first TikTok ideas. Questions are always a great hook as well because that definitely captures the attention of somebody who had that question on their mind.
Tip 2: Social Listening
Dabble at social listening by stepping outside of what your immediate clients are asking. Elevate yourself as an authority figure inside of your community by seeing what other people are asking. For example, there are some awesome sites and programs like AnswerThePublic, TubeBuddy and SEMrush, where you can type in a topic or even a question. From there, be loaded with other questions that people are actually typing into search bars! Most of the time, your roadblock is not knowing what to say or how to say it. And so, in that sense, social listening helps you get past all kinds of writer’s block and give you endless TikTok ideas!
Tip 3: The Competition
Take a look at other people who are in and around your field who are already creating the type of content that you want to create on TikTok. Be careful here because you don’t want to just copy and produce an exact carbon copy of a person that you are not. Instead, simply study these other creators who are having success not just in views, but especially in conversions. Study what is it about their video that would make sense to put into yours. Maybe it’s their hook their editing style or jump cuts. Maybe it’s the fact that all of their videos are being filmed from their phones, or maybe it’s that none of them are being filmed in their hands. Whatever it is, write it down, pay attention, and figure out the “what” to help you get into your own personal unique style.
Tip 4: Repurposing Your Content
We absolutely support repurposing videos that you already have out there. But be careful because a big mistake people make is that they end up pulling videos from YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram that make zero sense going on TikTok. Think about TikTok as another friendship group or networking community. You want to immerse yourself and become a part of that community. You don’t wanna go there, pump and dump content, and then leave. That’s entirely self-serving, not even paying attention to the culture or the conversation that is already there.
If you already have video content out there, you could potentially repurpose it on TikTok with little effort on your end. But you do want to take into consideration a couple of things.
The hook. Are you able to capture people’s attention immediately?
The dimensions of the video. Typically, when you go wide screen on TikTok and there’s a lot of black on top and on the bottom, that’s not gonna perform as well. So, try to zoom in and make sure that it’s still just as high res.
The length. Make sure that you’re not going too long. Because videos on TikTok are generally short-form, so videos that are longer feel really, really, really long.
On top of that, any type of editing, effects, or music. Make sure that it is compatible with the TikTok style!
Think about if you were to randomly pop up on the For You page and ask yourself, “If I had no idea who I was, would this video actually make sense to the person who’s seeing me pop up on their feed?” If the answer is no, figure out how you can edit it to make sense, or simply drop it and reshoot that entire concept in a way that does.
Tip 5: Content Ideation, Idea Capture, and Scheduling
When it comes to compiling ideas, we very much recommend having a designated journal or a folder inside of your phone. Where when you get that little spark of TikTok ideas at 1am in the morning or in the middle of your day, you’re able to just jot it down and save it for later. Otherwise, you will most definitely forget!
The other thing to be aware of is that with TikTok, you can now schedule videos from the desktop. It’s not perfect and doesn’t have all of the customisation that you would when uploading to mobile, but it’s a little bit of something that can help you save some time and energy when it comes to working ahead of time.
Tip 6: Batching Your Workload
Now it’s possible that your love language is not batching. And you’re a Type B visionary who you just like to make content when you feel like, and that is totally fine. So, maybe for you, batching makes sense in terms of task, but not in ideation. So, what we mean by that is, for example, you can just choose to film once a day. And in that single sitting, you can do 10, or seven, or five TikTok videos. You just need to figure out a way to be able to batch content and batch tasks.
What do we mean by batching tasks? Well, for example, in one sitting, you might be doing the filming. In another sitting, you might be doing the editing. The next sitting, you might be doing the adding of text. And then in another sitting, taking care of title cards or the actual lower thirds captions. And then from there, uploading manually as needed. Or, if you want, you can use that not-yet-perfect scheduling tool on the TikTok desktop platform.
If you found this helpful and you wanna learn more about how you can use TikTok to stand out as a business or start to collaborate with others, definitely check out our TikTok for business posts!