TikTok’s skyrocketing popularity has revolutionized the way users locate and interact with new brands, especially in the Gen Z demographic. Instead of looking up popular restaurants and bars on Google, they might go on TikTok and see what their favorite local influencers recommend.Better still,that influencer could be you.

The platform allows you to get a more personalized connection with your audience than ever before. And it all begins by getting more TikTok followers to grow your presence. There are several strategies you can use to achieve that.

#1: Learn About Your Audience

If you haven’t precisely defined your audience niche, now might be the time to do so. It will help you curate your content to match with what your audience likes. That could be anything from cooking, workouts, lifestyle, hobbies, home improvement, fashion, and more.

For a business, that can be quite easy. Use the existing customer base you’ve acquired and create Venn diagrams of their personas and most common likes. You can even poll the clients on how they like to use TikTok and leverage that information.

But if you want to be a creator, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper, particularly in your own history. When starting a TikTok influencer account, you need to be genuine and relatable to your audience while still maintaining your presence. However, you also need to be somewhat of an ideal.

But your goal when defining your audience is to both identify a niche and figure out how to be different from the competition. In the cooking niche, for example, you can spot significant differences in videos for people who want easy-to-make meals and elaborate multinational dishes. Finding the right measure of how far you can stretch your content will ensure it gets seen by enough people, but also makes the right people interact with it.

Luckily, this gets a bit easier once you get going. TikTok has integrated its data analytics tools into the app from the get-go, so you can use the “Followers” tab to check how your current audience interacts with the platform. Then, you can use your previous videos to see which ones might need to be revisited to determine if they are a viable way to get a following.

#2: Get on With the Trends

Viral videos and trends are what pushed TikTok to its popularity peaks, and there’s not really a formula for creating a new trend. Trends are typically self-contained and arise from recent events, but they can sprout from a challenge or a brand pushing an innovative idea out there.

The best way to learn what all the cool kids are watching is to consume a lot of TikTok content. Since trends come and go, what might be great one week could be old news the next. For that reason, month-long analytics can be unhelpful. Browse through popular feeds and determine common links between the most viewed content. Perhaps it’s a particular sound bite or song, a style of video, or a talking point.

However, it’s also important to keep in mind that you have to put a unique spin on a trend. Blindly following the next best thing won’t make you that much different from the trend’s originator, especially if you share most of your audience with them.

#3: Focus on Quality Over Quantity

There’s a saying that TikTok has its own version of ABC: Always Be Content-ing. That is true to an extent. Maintaining a regular posting schedule that accounts for when your audience is most active on the app allows you to leverage numbers to your advantage and grow your TikTok followers similar to your existing ones.

However, video quality can be what pushes your account out of relative obscurity. While users watch more than an hour of videos each day on average, the average attention span for younger viewers is less than 10 seconds. That means that even if TikTok itself prefers longer content, you have only the beginning of the video to grab a viewer’s attention.

Invest in higher-quality equipment, such as soundproofing, a camera or smartphone, and lighting. Additionally, use editing software to make your videos look more professional.

On the other hand, you can also go in the opposite direction. TikTok was built on genuine and approachable content, with videos made from people’s bedrooms with only their smartphones. These types of videos can generate quite a buzz as well. You can still plan carefully around them to ensure they can be filmed in one take and perfect some details, but an audience can usually tell when something is over-edited.

Ultimately, the style of videos you take for TikTok and how much editing you need will depend on your audience and what they respond to best.

#4: Don’t Forget About SEO

Even if you make the best videos in the world, people will hardly see them if the TikTok algorithm won’t suggest them to new viewers. That’s where search engine optimization comes in. This is similar to how you’d rank a blog post on Google: keywords and descriptions.

On TikTok, the algorithm looks at the titles, descriptions, and hashtags to categorize videos and curate its users’ viewer experience. Similarly to how you’d do it with Google-focused content, don’t just deploy all the popular hashtags and call it a day. Users won’t interact with your video unless it’s truly relevant to the hashtags it’s in, and the algorithm will pick up on the lack of interaction and downrank your content.

However, the algorithm also accounts for the captions and music or sound effects you incorporate into the video. If a particular song or artist has gone viral recently, that can influence your video’s placement in homepage feeds.

You can also leverage one Google SEO foundation to get more followers on your TikTok account: expertise. By posting educational and genuine content, users will comment and react to your videos more, which will make the algorithm more likely to suggest your profile to other viewers.

#5: Boost Your Profile

Users are usually hesitant to follow a channel they know little about. If your profile is obscure and doesn’t have a lot of info for viewers to go on, it might get left in the dark despite outputting great content.

Fill in your profile with a picture, accurate information, and a meaningful mission statement about what the profile is for. Even if you’re not a brand, you’ll need to explain how exactly your videos are helping the world. Maybe you’re trying to unravel misinformation. Maybe you want to review the best tech products. Find your profile’s calling, pair it with the right audience niche, and get to work making great content.

Finally, you can get a boost by buying TikTok followers. These followers help your profile look more legitimate by instilling a base level of interactivity. Once viewers see that you have a follower base, they’re more likely to get on board, and your account will grow organically from there.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed. The views of the article are that of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of GPlus.)