How to Increase Engagement Rate on TikTok

A person with a computer and another with a megaphone looking at a chart showing an increase in a TikTok profile’s engagement rate.

TikTok has quickly developed into a preeminent social media network which attracts a wide audience. Therefore, it is no surprise that various individuals, businesses, and influencers all want to grow their following in order to showcase their creative content to more people. If you are looking to grow the number of your followers, you may be wondering how to increase your engagement rate on TikTok. This is because high engagement rates are a good sign that your content is resonating with your audience, which would make them more likely to follow your profile. 

So what should you know about how to get better engagement on TikTok? We will take you through some of our best practices that you should follow for increasing engagement rates on TikTok. Below, we will present our 9 tips that are everyone on TikTok can use to help improve their engagement rates and attract a larger audience.

What is a Good Engagement Rate on TikTok?

To start, you may want to set baseline goals for your TikTok engagement rate. For that, you should begin with researching the average TikTok engagement rate. You may want a definitive answer but, as you can see from simply Googling this topic, there are different studies that provide different answers to this question. So what should you do when confronted with such a wide-range of answers? 

What is important to understand is that you should benchmark your own profile against other similar profiles. You may choose profiles for your benchmarking analysis either because they are similar businesses, are involved in the same industry, or post similar content to your own. If you use a social media tool that allows you to track dozens or hundreds of profiles, then you can get a good idea about the average TikTok engagement rate for your industry, since you have selected the dataset yourself.  

Once you know what the average TikTok engagement rate across similar profiles, you can then move on to defining what is a good TikTok engagement rate is for your industry. In order to find out what’s a good engagement rate on TikTok, you can take the top 25% of profiles you are tracking when it comes to their engagement rate and look at the average between them. Again, you should always be rather focused on profiles that relate to the same industry or are similar to yours.

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How to Increase your TikTok Engagement Rate

When thinking about how to achieve a good engagement rate on TikTok, you need to understand how TikTok works. The first thing you should understand is how TikTok is designed to increase user engagement. Engagement is important on TikTok since it indicates to the algorithm that people like your content. If you can increase your engagement rate, more people may see your posts in their feed if your content is related to their interests.

Below, we will explain 9 ways that can help you to increase your TikTok engagement: 

  1. Clearly Identify your Audience and their Content Preferences
  2. Concentrate on Writing Amazing Hooks (also Thumbnail Images)
  3. Be Active with your Community
  4. Posting Times Matter – Discover When they Are!
  5. Benchmark yourself Against (and Learn From) Other Similar Profiles
  6. Research What Hashtags to Use
  7. Always be Posting: Regularly and Often
  8. Stay on Top of Popular Trends
  9. Consider Promoting your own Contests or Polls

1. Clearly Identify your Audience and their Content Preferences

When you are starting out thinking about how to increase engagement on TikTok, it is helpful to know what type of content resonates with your target audience. First of all, even if people see your content in their feed, if it is not interesting to them, then they most likely won’t interact with it. 

Understanding who your audience is and what type of content they like can be made much easier using a social media tool. This is because, social media tools can provide various content analysis to show you what type not only for your own TikTok, but also what may be generating high engagement rates for your competitor’s profiles.

2. Concentrate on Writing Amazing Hooks (also Thumbnail Images)

One important aspect concerning how to get better engagement on TikTok relates to piquing the interest of people to actual view your content. For this reason, hooks represent one of the most important ways that you can increase TikTok engagement. This also involves creating engaging thumbnail images for videos since they can show people that your content is worth watching, liking, or sharing. 

If you are looking to increase TikTok engagement through hooks, it can also be helpful to incorporate CTAs as well. These can be as simple as “Don’t miss this” or “Funniest thing ever,” can help get people to watch and engage with your content. Be sure to get creative with your hooks, CTAs, and thumbnails and monitor what works and what doesn’t.

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3. Be Active with your Community

One straight-forward way to increase engagement on TikTok is to actively engage with those interacting with your content. Normally, you would associate ideas about how to increase TikTok engagement with the content you create. However, it is actually quite important to make your audience feel a connection toward the content you are producing. 

The logic behind this is that when you interact with your community, then they will be more likely to continually engage with your content. You can use community management tools to help you more efficiently do these community management tasks once your following starts growing.

4. Posting Times Matter – Discover When they Are!

Posting times are important when trying to increase your engagement rate on TikTok. As we pointed out earlier, engagement rate is important factor for TikTok not only because it shows you how well your content is resonating with your audience, but also because it can help you with the TikTok algorithm. We covered already covered how to understand TikTok SEO, but one important part of this is having high engagement rates for your posts.

So, if you want to know how to boost engagement on TikTok, then it is helpful to find the best times to post. We have covered how to find the best times to post for TikTok in another article, so you can find more information there. 

5. Benchmark yourself Against (and Learn From) Other Similar Profiles

A picture of a graph and a circle symbolizing 24 hours in a day.

In trying to understand how to increase engagement on TikTok, you shouldn’t be afraid to use other TikTok profiles to see what is working. As we already pointed out, you should always be studying what content types and formats are performing well among profiles similar to yours. This can help you more quickly identify what type of content you should be producing that corresponds to higher engagement rates among your target audience. 

One way you can think about how to increase engagement on TikTok is to set goals that are based off of data in your industry. However, in doing so, you should always have concrete goals in mind that you are aiming for. This can be done by monitoring the average engagement rates for similar profiles and setting your goals according to your industry instead of looking only at general engagement rates.

6. Research What Hashtags to Use

Improving your engagement rate on TikTok is helped by getting your content in front of people who are interested in it. One of the ways that you can make that happen is to use the right hashtags for your TikTok posts. Hashtags allow you to indicate that your content relates to a specific topic and, with the right tools, you can easily identify which hashtags may be associated with relatively high engagement rates.

7. Always be Posting: Regularly and Often

One way to increase engagement on TikTok is to post regularly in order to show people that you are continually contributing the content that they want to see. Of course, posting many times a week is important, although it is not advisable to post 6 times on one day and then not at all the rest of the week. 

Regular posting means that you are making sure that your voice is staying active and heard.  So, if you want to know how to boost engagement on TikTok, make sure that you are getting your content out there at regular intervals and make sure that your target audience is not wondering when you might be posting next.

8. Stay on Top of Popular Trends

One of the ways to learn how to get better engagement on TikTok is to research what is trending at a given moment. This can be done simply by monitoring what is in your own feed or the topics that other similar profiles are posting about.

However, if you are really serious about increasing your TikTok engagement rates, you can consider tracking various profiles with a social media tool that allows for advanced content analysis. From there you can analyze trending hashtags or keywords for a given timeframe to show you what topics are trending as well as pinpoint the posts with a high engagement rates to see what topics are generating interactions.

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9. Consider Promoting your own Contests or Polls

When thinking about how to improve TikTok engagement, you should also consider approaches that entice people to interact with the content you are posting. In reality, engagement rate on TikTok is helped when people don’t want to miss out on something, which makes contests, giveaways, or simply running interesting polls so effective. 

People love winning free things, whether from random luck or by winning some sort of contest or challenge. If you want to increase your TikTok engagement, you should consider brainstorming creative ideas for these types of contests, giveaways, or polls.

Conclusion: How to Increase your TikTok Engagement Rate

As we have shown in this article, you can learn how to improve TikTok engagement through following some or all of the best practices above. Increasing your TikTok engagement may take some time and effort, but concentrating on improving this metric can help you grow your following and reach. 

If you are looking for advanced benchmarking/analysis, community management, and research capabilities, Fanpage Karma is an all-in-one social media tool that provides just that. Better yet, Fanpage Karma offers a free 14-day trial of its tool, which also includes unlimited profile tracking

If you want a real-time look into how Fanpage Karma works, you can also participate in our free weekly webinar.

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