How Founders can Leverage their Personal TikTok to Supercharge Growth: Part 2
Featuring dating app Monet and athleisure brand SET Active
ICYMI: This is the second part of a 2-part series on founders tapping into their personal social media accounts to grow their brands. Head back to Part 1 to read about creator startups Clara and Stan.
Before jumping into this week’s content, let’s first recap what we covered last week:
As a way of standing out in today’s crowded digital marketplace, brands have been incorporating more personal elements of the business into their evergreen marketing messaging. Common examples of this include sharing origin stories, company values, and a variety of behind the scenes content via social channels.
But more recently, founders have been leveraging their own personal social accounts as an extension of their brands, offering a unique POV and personality that attracts potential consumers in a different way than the brand account alone could.
Keep reading to explore how two more brands leveraged their founder’s personal TikToks to reach millions of customers, and even investors, overnight:
Monet Dating - the dating app that starts with a doodle
Before starting her sophomore year of college at UPenn, Joanna Shan decided to take a gap year, during which she and some close friends began working on a passion project. This project turned business is what came to be known as Monet: a new kind of dating app that uses drawing as a fun, creative means of connection.
One of the first TikToks Joanna made about Monet went viral within a day, attracting 570,000+ views and 180,000+ likes. This inspired her to lean-in and utilize TikTok as their primary marketing strategy to grow the dating app.
Read more about how Joanna used TikTok to grow Monet to 30k+ users via our Slope Interview Series
SET Active - a trendy athleisure brand
SET Active is a popular athleisure brand most known for their matching workout sets. Coming in a variety of on trend styles and colors, their limited drops often sell out in less than a day, and are a must-have among the fitness/lifestyle community.
Founder Lindsey Carter has been using her personal TikTok to share bits and pieces of the business and marketing strategy side of the brand — answering questions on how she started it, what she wishes she would have done differently, glimpses into a variety of internal meetings and materials, influencer partnerships, and roles they are looking to hire for.
At first the candidness of the videos was appreciated by viewers, but as reach grew, so did the criticism – particularly surrounding SET Active’s hiring process and compensating influencers strictly through product giftings.
Soon after one of the videos expressing disappointment with the brand went viral, Lindsey shared that she took this commentary very personally, stood firm in her positioning on the topics, and concluded a break from posting on the platform would be beneficial for her.
As a business (or a human), there is no one thing you can do that will make everyone happy. But on a platform like TikTok where commentary spreads through communities like wildfire, emotions run just as hot – leading many to respond to criticism in a manner that is charged with hurt, shame, rage, and sadness rather than a place of understanding.
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Main Takeaways:
A founder’s personal TikTok can serve as an extremely powerful marketing channel, but should be tread with caution.
Founders can use these topics as a guide to creating brand-focused content to share on their personal pages:
Storytime Series: this can be anything from how they came up with the idea for the product or brand, funny stories from the early stages of building, product fails etc. Keep it relatable :)
Q+A with customers: founders can use their voice to add more color in responses to questions that aren’t necessarily product specific
Hiring: more recently founders have been leveraging their personal digital communities to find talent to full open roles
It is evident that the way we interact with and on social media – as an individual, a founder, a brand, a dog account – has changed quite a bit over the past 1-2 years with the popularity of TikTok, and we have yet to fully author a playbook to guide these relationships. So remain mindful of how we curate our responses to digital commentary, as no one is perfect and we are all still navigating exactly how new age “viral” marketing tactics impact the mission or strategy at large. Own it, and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
🎵 Trending Sounds
Using trending sounds is key to growing on TikTok. Sounds help increase your chance for virality as well as increasing your video’s average watch time. Every week, we’ll round up a couple trending sounds that we think you should pay attention to, and how you can use them in your content.
What this sound is: An audio originally created by a popular dog account, Tatum Talks, is now being used by creators to show off their version of “two peas in a pod” — ie two things that go together well or resemble one another.
How your brand can use it: This sound can be used to show off products that are meant to be used together. Or, to share a montage of employees and their furry friends at HQ!
What this sound is: Extracted from an episode of the reality TV show, Dance Moms, this sound is a voice over of dance teacher Abby Lee Miller ranking her student’s performances in her notorious pyramid structure.
How your brand can use it: Brands can use this sound to show the evolution of a product from first (or worst) to where it stands today. Or if recruiting is your goal, have fun with presenting the pros and “cons” of working at your company.
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