How To Get TikTok Famous [7 Essential Steps]

TikTok went from a niche Gen Z website for dance and karaoke videos to a billion-user social media platform in just four years. Today, it’s home to countless creators with millions of followers, with new accounts going viral every month.

But while many people ask, “How do I get TikTok famous?” few are willing to do what it takes to stand out on the platform. The good news? Brands that put in the work and know what to prioritize can figure out how to become popular on TikTok much faster.

So, if you want to be the next big thing on the platform, read on and discover how to get TikTok famous in 2024 and beyond.

Why Should You Become TikTok Famous?

Becoming famous on TikTok may seem appealing, but why does it make sense for brands? Well, here are a few compelling reasons:

• Improve Brand Recognition. 40% of Millennial TikTok users say the platform helps them discover new things. When you become famous on TikTok, you’ll gain access to a young audience that you can engage and turn into customers, making them aware of your brand and products.
• Get Your Offers Noticed. TikTok is a visual platform that works really well for displaying your best offers. And the platform makes it easy to create a variety of marketing campaigns that feature your products and drive sales. For example, you could showcase professional UGC videos to create a desire for your product and highlight its features.
• Build a Loyal Follower Base. TikTok offers many ways to connect with the people who follow you. By tapping into the current trends to create entertaining content and showing the human side behind your company, you can create a loyal and engaged follower base of your best customers.

How to Become Famous on TikTok

Being strategic can make figuring out how to become popular on TikTok a much more manageable task. To help you get on the right track, let’s look at actionable steps you can take starting today.

1. Learn How TikTok Works

TikTok is different from other social media platforms, both in how it’s set up and in the audience that uses it. So you need to have a deep understanding of how TikTok works to develop a content strategy that reflects your brand, appeals to the people you want to reach, and helps you achieve your goals.

A good first step is to familiarize yourself with the TikTok algorithm. The For You section does a great job of displaying relevant and engaging videos to users based on their habits and preferences, so you need to use the algorithm to your advantage to ensure that you not only get on people’s feeds but also become visible to audiences that are likely to be interested.

2. Define Your Niche

TikTok’s huge audience means there are many people you can get in front of. But there are also a ton of creators vying for their attention, which is why you need to be clear about who you’re targeting and how you’re going to get their attention.

Instead of going broad, it makes a lot of sense to go narrow and deep, focusing on a specific niche that you can excel in. For businesses, a good place to start is to figure out how you could help your target audience.

By taking a solution-oriented approach, you can get the attention of people who are looking for solutions similar to yours, which is crucial if you want your TikTok following to translate into tangible business outcomes.

3. Look at Your Competitors

Figuring out what works in your niche takes a lot of trial and error. But you can fast-track that process by looking at your competitors who already have a presence on the platform.

When analyzing your competitors on TikTok, you can discover:

• How they position their brand
• The types of content they create
• What tends to perform best
• What gaps you can fill
• Opportunities for getting early traction

Another reason why competitor research is crucial when figuring out how to get TikTok famous is that it helps you stand out. To avoid being just another brand on the platform, your best bet is to keep track of what others are doing so that you can find your authentic voice.

4. Create a Memorable Profile

Your TikTok profile is the central hub for your brand on the platform, so it needs to make it clear who you are and what your brand is about. That’s why being deliberate about how you set up your profile is so important to success.

The first step is to create a TikTok business account, which will give you additional options for tracking performance, running ads, and sending automated messages. It’s also a good idea to get your profile verified, as that will make your account more credible while also increasing exposure.

Then, you’ll need to set up your branding elements. The profile photo should be consistent across your social media platforms so that there’s no confusion about who’s behind the account. But you can get more creative with your description, highlighting your value proposition and using an enticing CTA to get people to click through to your website.

5. Make Your Content Stand Out

There’s no single strategy that will get your TikTok videos to take off. But you do need to meet a certain threshold if you want to have a decent chance of getting more views consistently.

For starters, you’ll need to make your videos professional to get people to watch them. While that doesn’t necessarily mean having to use anything more than a smartphone, your videos will require some editing, good sound quality, and professional creative choices that match the format and purpose of your video.

With practice, you should get good at making great content for TikTok, but you can also consider hiring UGC creators capable of producing high-quality videos around your products.

6. Leverage Trends

TikTok has become a hotspot for the newest internet trends, featuring challenges, memes, and various video formats that originate on the site and quickly spread to other social media platforms.

That’s why a big part of cracking the code on how to be a Tik Toker comes down to keeping your finger on the pulse and knowing the current trends that are on the rise. To do that, you can:

• Keep tabs on the trending hashtags, familiarizing yourself with the content behind them.
• Look for common themes in the videos, such as the formats, the sounds, and the elements that are used.
• Follow popular TikTokers to discover the trends they create and implement.
• Create content around popular memes, adapting them to fit your brand, audience, and products.

7. Go Against the Grain

Every public communication you make is a representation of your brand, which is why you need to be careful not to post anything that could upset people or be misunderstood. However, if you want to have a good chance of becoming famous on TikTok, you will need to take risks to avoid creating safe but generally boring branded content.

Brands like Ryanair often go viral on TikTok by using humor and absurd videos that gently poke fun at their customers. If you can make it a part of your identity, calling out your customers can turn some of the complaints people may have about your brand into a relatable and funny way to form a genuine connection.

TikTok Success Stories

Seeing brands get millions of followers on TikTok may seem impossible to match, but those brands started from scratch as well. And they can offer a lot of valuable insights you can learn from.

Here are a few examples of TikTok accounts that became famous to get you inspired:

1. Fenty Beauty: 2.7M Followers | 56.3M Likes

If you have a physical product that people use, one of the best ways to get great engagement that leads to sales is to offer tutorials and product demonstrations. By showcasing your products in action, ideally through user-generated videos, you can help people understand how your product works and see the impact it can make.

That’s what the majority of Fenty Beauty’s posts revolve around, helping the brand consistently get thousands or even millions of views from people who are likely to be interested in the products themselves. Of course, it also helps that 50% of the brand is owned by Rihanna, who is often featured in the content as well.

2. Scrub Daddy: 3.9M Followers | 83M Likes

Scrub Daddy is a brand that proves you don’t need to have an exciting or glamorous product to generate millions of views on TikTok. The brand sells cleaning products and manages to regularly get hundreds of thousands of views, with some videos getting as many as 24 million.

The reason Scrub Daddy is so successful is their amazing ability to tap into the hottest trends and challenges on TikTok, finding creative and engaging ways to connect them to the brand and its products.

3. Crocs: 2.1M Followers | 23.5M Likes

Crocs have been a part of meme culture long before TikTok, but the brand took its quirky image and made it a central part of its messaging on the platform. Using memes, product demonstrations, and challenges that feature various Crocs designs, the company consistently gets millions of views that often lead to sales as well.

The brand doesn’t shy away from leaning into the “ugly shoe” reputation, using humor to connect with people and make its aesthetic a part of a movement, creating a sense of community between the brand’s customers.

Bottom Line

Discovering how to become TikTok famous is a process that can be broken down into actionable steps. You need to know how you want to present yourself, who you want to reach, and the types of videos you want to make.

But perhaps even more importantly, look for an authentic voice that helps your content stand out, leveraging trends and injecting your own personality to become a TikTok account that’s actually worth following.