Yes, TikTok remains under a cloud, and yes, there are ongoing concerns about its data-sharing and moderation processes. For some, that will mean that they’ll look to avoid the app entirely, but many others are still looking at ways to tap into the video platform’s popularity, and in particular, its reach with younger audiences.
How you view TikTok will come down to your own perception of the various issues at hand, and your concerns around such, but for those who are looking to maximize their TikTok presence, TikTok has this week published some new pointers on how to make best use of its analytics tools, which are available on TikTok Pro accounts.
Your first step, of course, is to switch to a Pro account – you can do this by:
- From your profile page, open the Privacy and Settings tab
- Choose “Manage My Account”
- Tap “Switch to Pro Account”
From there, you need to select the category for your pro account – ‘Creator’ or ‘Business’. You then enter the topic category for your profile, and any additional details as requested (mostly basic), and that’s it – you now have a TikTok Pro account.
You can access TikTok analytics from within the app or on desktop:
“Once you’ve switched, you’ll find your analytics in the “Pro Account” page of your settings. On desktop, you can access the Analytics page by hovering over your profile photo in the upper-right corner of your screen and clicking “View Analytics.” You can also download and export your Analytics directly to your computer when you access TikTok from your desktop device.”
That’s a handy note for businesses, giving them more ways to manage their TikTok presence from their home base.
As you can see in the screenshots above, there are three elements to TikTok analytics:
Overview – The Overview section provides a general summary of your account’s performance over time. “You’ll see the total number of times your videos were viewed, the number of users who follow your account, and the number of times your profile was viewed.”
Content – Here you can see a listing of your uploads from the past seven days, in order of newest to oldest videos. You can also see videos that are trending on your account. “These are the top nine videos with the fastest growth in view numbers over the past seven days.”
Followers – And the last tab is ‘Followers’, which displays your follower count over time so you can view trends in audience growth. You can also access an overview of total likes, comments, and shares that your videos have received.
As with all social platforms, TikTok’s analytics data provides guidance as to how you can improve your performance, and maximize your content efforts.
Though TikTok does note that:
“In reviewing your analytics, we recommend considering the big picture of your video performance over time. Lots of factors determine how content is recommended in the For You feed, so no one engagement metric is necessarily more important than another as you survey how your videos are performing.”
Indeed, TikTok also recently provided an overview of how its feed algorithm works, and it’s important to understand the key factors it considers as indicative of relevance, and/or popularity, in working to improve your performance.
But definitely, if you’re serious about maximizing your TikTok efforts, it’s worth switching to a Pro account and getting access to its advanced analytics tools. Given that TikTok’s algorithm is different to other platforms, it can also be harder to predict future success. But the more insight you have, the better.
