You may be avoiding it, or you may be scrolling it for an hour a day. Either way, you likely know by now that TikTok is a popular platform, especially for the younger crowd.
Put simply, it’s a short-form, video-sharing app that allows users to create and share videos no longer than three minutes in length on any topic. The most popular use of the app is to record and share lip-syncing and trendy dances. But if you’ve been on TikTok lately, you’re probably aware that the platform is much more than choreography. TikTok is quickly becoming an integral part of many schools’ marketing strategies. As it becomes more popular with Gen Z, so does its reputation amongst education marketers.
In May 2024, Backlinko announced that TikTok has more than one billion users:
Additionally, TikTok CEO Shou Chew announced in January of 2024 that over 170 million Americans use the app.
This data comes from Newsroom TikTok. We can see many Gen Z users, while the app’s popularity continues to grow among all adult age groups.
With celebrity endorsements, localized content, and easy video creation, sharing, and viewing, TikTok is a fun, entertaining, and addictive app that has seen a surge in daily users over the last few years and is only predicted to continue trending upwards. Because it’s a very visual app with a lot of room for creativity, it’s an ideal place to showcase what campus and student life are like for your students.
Why TikTok is So Popular, Especially Amongst Your Prospective Students
TikTokers love the app. They spend an average of 58 minutes and 24 seconds on the platform. Gen Z’ers specifically love the fine-tuned algorithm, easy editing tools for endless creativity, more inclusivity, trendsetting, and humorous content that can be a nice break from the day. As Instagram has become more polished and curated, TikTok has answered with zany creativity. Because of the design of the app and the “For You” feed, it’s easy to discover new creators and for anyone to go viral based on their inventiveness and talent. As the biggest age range demographic of TikTok’ers makes up the majority of most schools, colleges, and universities’ primary target audiences, this is the newest and fastest-growing space to reach your prospective students.
Example: Day-in-the-life TikToks have been trending among young people recently. And they are exactly as they sound: Students show what a day in their lives looks like from their point of view, both on campus and off. Below is a snapshot of a day in TikTok’s life from UBC Nursing student @fatima_bianca. Fatima’s video has good engagement, with 22K views, 874 likes, and 22 comments.
Considering TikTok as Part of Your School’s Social Media Marketing Strategy
TikTok is great for schools looking to increase brand awareness and generate leads. In a recent post about video strategy, we touched on schools using TikTok marketing and how your school shouldn’t underestimate the power of short-form video formats for their potential reach and impact.
Depending on your target audience for the programs you’d like to promote—or your school as a whole— the TikTok user base might fit your targeting exactly. If you can make that correlation, continue reading on as we cover some clever ways to get started with existing content being effectively turned into ads.
Example: The University of Strathclyde tried three different creative approaches on TikTok, each focusing on a different aspect of university life, from Glasgow’s culture to its reputable campus. It also used student-generated content to showcase these aspects and the benefits of studying there. The campaign stats included 1.47M impressions, 14K clicks, and a cost of £0.09 per click.
Source: TikTok for Business – Europe
What is “Organic Creator Content”?
Also known as user-generated content (UGC), organic content is any content that a person has created to share their experience, recommendation, or opinion. It might be influential, but it is not connected to an ad, sponsored, paid for, or already partnered with a brand, product, or service. It’s just content that exists. A regular person who enjoys creating content and sharing on their account.
A “content creator” or, more plainly, “creator” title will often be reserved for a person on any social media platform who puts out a lot of content at a prolific pace and might do so to earn remuneration eventually. Or they may already be compensated for some of their work, but they still create for the sake of creating.
Example: Search for your school in TikTok to see what’s already being created about you. Here are the top search results for “Dartmouth College.”
Current students and alumni who are already content creators are a great asset in your marketing resources portfolio and can be key in how to generate student leads. More than half of surveyed students are looking for and citing online conversations with student ambassadors as the most helpful resource when considering which university to apply to. Gen Z prospective students want to see their peers discussing their experiences with your school before deciding which institution to attend.
If you’re looking for content that’s already been created about your school, start by searching the name of your school and any branded hashtags you use on TikTok.
Another great place to start is the Creator Marketplace on TikTok, where you’ll also have a chance to see private videos, which could be boosted later. TikTok runs this platform and houses thousands of profiles of TikTok creators. Any brand can search the marketplace for creators whose audiences, creativity, and aesthetics best fit the target market of their campaigns.
Taking Steps to Start Boosting Creator Content
You might wonder if there is a tried-and-true TikTok strategy for higher education. Schools achieving success with TikTok ads appear to be gaining good results with one common key ingredient: Collaborating with their students to ensure a fresh, relevant perspective from the platform’s users.
This dovetails into a new feature that TikTok recently launched called “Spark” ads. With TikTok’s Spark Ads feature, you can identify videos that fit the look and feel of your campaigns.
Due to the type of content that gets shared and made popular on TikTok, many creators will feature a brand, product, or service in their TikTok videos without any brand deal secured. Again, they are happy to talk about a day in their lives or what goals and activities they have been working on lately.
TikTok has made it easy for organizations to reach out to creators effectively and use or re-purpose their content for paid campaigns. These aspirational and effective content pieces have proven value as they come from an authentic third party that your school’s target audience has deemed credible.
Example: Lindo Korchi documents their time at Kai Japanese Language School under the username @lindokorchi. Their caption for this TikTok is “Had a great time here.” This TikTok has generated an impressive 44K views, 8,577 likes and 301 comments.
A Spark Ads Overview for Schools
Spark Ads is a newer native ad format by TikTok that enables your school to boost your own TikTok account’s posts and organic posts made by other creators—with their authorization. You can use Spark to get an association boost without having to create anything yourself or even commission a school ambassador or creator.
Given that you’re essentially boosting already strong-performing content, it could be a great way to maximize reach and resonance. This could be particularly handy for a marketing team that is less familiar with the platform and may not have the budget or skills for original material.
Promoted clips through Spark allow your school to utilize TikTok’s ad-targeting tools. So you can benefit from both reach and a targeted focus, honing in on your key markets.
“From a holistic marketing picture, we’ve seen more and more brands investing in native content as part of their overall marketing strategies. When we talk about excellence in form and function, we talk about native ads. Standing in between organic content and advertising, Spark Ads make up a hybrid format that delivers unique value to both businesses and users. The native styles and features of Spark Ads harmoniously blend with TikTok’s vibe, helping businesses achieve fully native and authentic ad experiences, higher campaign results at a lower cost, and ongoing marketing impact in the TikTok community.” —TikTok for Business
With Spark Ads, schools can build long-lasting connections with their creator students, alumni, and future students that are authentic and rooted in their broader academic and extracurricular community. Spark Ads offer education marketers three main benefits:
- You can save time because you aren’t continually designing and filming new ad creatives yourself.
- Social proof is maximized by using UGC.
- Seamlessly partner with influential TikTok users.
Example: TikTok has quickly observed the differences between regular in-feed TikTok ads and Spark Ads. The main difference between the two is the position of the CTA button.
Short video promotions are not easy to master! You only have a brief time to grab attention; people will take the tiniest reason to swipe up (and away) on your video. Therefore, spending a little time on TikTok is important before considering all your ad options. Scroll through your feed and note what’s gaining traction, which will inform your approach.
With Spark Ads, you can promote popular clips that may already mention or feature your school. In this respect, Spark Ads could be a major boost for your TikTok approach. And while it won’t fit all strategies, there could be a place for it in your strategy.
How to Create Spark Ads – Five Steps from TikTok
Step 1: Enable ad authorization. You may need to instruct the students (creators) you are working with on how to do this!
The creator you are working with will need to turn on the ad authorization toggle on the TikTok app. Enabling ad authorization allows you to feature their videos on TikTok. From the TikTok app:
- Tap on Me to go to your personal profile page, then tap the 3 dots in the top-right corner.
- From the Settings and Privacy page, tap Privacy.
- Turn on the Ad authorization toggle.
Step 2: Authorize the video for promotional use—you may need to instruct the students (creators) you are working with on how to do this as well!
The creator you are working with must select and authorize a video for promotion. From the TikTok app:
- Open one of your TikTok posts on the TikTok app.
- Tap the three dots, then tap Ad settings.
- Agree to the Advertising Terms of Service to authorize the post for ads.
Step 3: Generate video code – you may need to instruct the students (creators) you are working with on how to do this as well!
After the creator authorizes a video for promotional use, they must generate a video code they can share with you and select how long they authorize their post. From a post’s Ad settings module:
- Tap Generate Code, then select a period to authorize a post for third-party advertisers. Choose from 7, 30, or 60 days.
- Next, tap Copy Code to share the code with the party using the video in their ad.
Step 4: Enter the video code on TikTok Ads Manager
Once you have received a video code from the creator you are working with, you must enter that code into TikTok Ads Manager. From TikTok Ads Manager:
- Go to the Creative tab.
- Open the Spark Ads list and then click the Apply for Authorization button.
- Paste the video code in the search bar and click Search.
- Review the post and click Confirm.
For videos made by two creators, like duets and stitch posts, you must enter video codes from both creators featured in the videos. From the Apply for Authorization module:
- Enter the video code from the 2nd creator/account into the search field and click Search.
- Once the system confirms this is a dual-creator post, you must enter the video code from the 1st creator/account’s original post.
- After the system retrieves the original post, review the posts and click Confirm.
Suppose you have collaborated with creators via TikTok Creator Marketplace. In that case, you can directly synchronize the posts from the TikTok Creator Marketplace to TikTok Ads Manager and do not need to generate and apply the video code manually. To do this, you may check a box within the collaboration workflow before the video is posted by any creators.
Step 5: Publish Spark Ads
After successfully adding the video codes to your TikTok Ads Manager, you can create Spark Ads. From TikTok Ads Manager:
- Create a campaign and set up an ad group.
- At the Ad level, select the Spark Ads format.
- Under Upload Creatives, click Select Posts from Library.
- Choose an authorized post you want to use.
- Finish creating your ad, then click Submit.
Additional Tips and Notes:
- Once a video has been authorized as an ad, you can no longer edit the caption.
- Private videos become public once used in campaigns and will remain so during their promotion.
- Organic videos used in Spark Ads will still be delivered organically, regardless of an associated campaign.
- It would be best to try to be particular about the music used by the creator you are working with. They should only use sounds and music from the TikTok Commercial Sounds library. Anything else may come under copyright infringement.
- It’s best to include hashtags like #[brandname]partner in compliance with trade commission guidelines.
- Influencers and creators should be allowed to create content according to their creativity. Nonetheless, providing them with guidelines helps keep your school’s brand consistent.
In Summary
At first, promoting organic, unbranded videos may have sounded strange. However, this new process for highlighting relevant content makes a lot of sense.
A unique TikTok marketing challenge is that you can’t just repurpose content from other platforms (like Facebook or Instagram) for ad campaigns. TikTok has its own defined presentation style; if you don’t tap into that, your promotions will not take off and do well. Spark Ads help solve that.
There’s a reason why TikTok keeps telling brands to ‘make TikToks not ads‘: The promotions that work best are those that match what users already see in their feeds.
According to Statista, TikTok mega-influencers with over one million followers worldwide charge an average starting rate of $1,200 per post.
Measuring the Impact
To track analytics on TikTok, you’ll need to use your Pro account, which allows you to keep track of the performance of your videos. Here, you’ll be able to track how well your videos are performing compared to your competitors, how many new followers you gained upon posting your latest video, and which videos are trending or the most engaging to your audiences.
