TikTok Marketing Guide For Brands, With Posting Time Data

What Is TikTok Marketing

TikTok marketing is a brand’s work to reach buyers with short videos on TikTok. In a year of videos from 16 brand accounts, the hour a video went out told us less than the video itself. The evening slot many posting tables recommend did no better than the morning or the afternoon. So the useful work is videos people watch to the end, each one read against your own account’s numbers.

It has 4 parts. The first is the videos on the brand’s own account. The second is videos made with creators, which our guide to key opinion leader (KOL) marketing covers. The third is ads bought in TikTok Ads Manager. The fourth is TikTok Shop, for brands that sell inside the app.

DataReportal reports that TikTok’s ad tools showed almost 57 million users aged 18 and over in Thailand.

How TikTok Picks Videos For The For You Feed

TikTok picks videos for each person’s For You feed mostly from how that person interacts with videos. That covers what they like, share, comment on, watch to the end or skip. TikTok’s help page on recommendations says these actions, and how long people watch, usually weigh more than the rest. People often call this system the TikTok algorithm.

TikTok lists two other groups of signals. One is about the video, such as its sounds, hashtags, views and the country it was posted in. The other is about the viewer, such as their language, location, time zone and device. The capture below shows the For You part of that page.

For a brand, this means the first seconds decide a lot. When early viewers swipe away, the video collects few of the signals TikTok weighs most. People who follow the brand also see its videos in the Following feed, which TikTok ranks separately.

What Videos A Brand Should Post On TikTok

A brand should post videos that answer a question its customers already have. Make the point in the first few seconds, and end with one thing the viewer can do next. Each type of video below does a different job, so mix them across a month.

Mark McDowell, who founded Primal, spoke this year with a business owner whose earlier agency had filmed a set of videos in the same spot against the same background. You can make similar videos, but change each one so it looks different. What matters most is the script, starting with the hook, the first line you say. On TikTok that line decides whether people keep watching past the first seconds.

A business account changes the music you can use. TikTok’s page on account types says verified business accounts use the Commercial Music Library. Its songs are cleared for commercial use. They cannot use the general music library, which is for personal use. Plan the sound when you write the script, before the video depends on a song the account cannot use.

What Is The Best Time To Post On TikTok

The best time to post on TikTok is when your own viewers are active. TikTok Studio shows this in the Viewers tab of Analytics, as the activity times of your viewers. A table made from other accounts does not show your viewers.

The tables on the first page of Google also disagree with each other. Buffer’s study of 7.1 million posts put the best single slot at 09:00 on Sunday, but it found evenings strongest on most days. Other pages on the same results page point to early morning, mid-afternoon or slots in US Eastern time.

So we checked what happened on real brand accounts. We looked at 1,446 videos from 16 brand TikTok accounts in Primal’s social media data over 12 months. They cover hospitals, building materials, laundry and lending. The evening, from 18:00 to midnight, held more videos than any other part of the day. The most common hour was 19:00.

So that small and large accounts could be compared, we measured each video against its own account’s usual views. Usual here means the median, the middle video when you line up all of an account’s videos by views. The chart below shows the 1,440 videos posted between 06:00 and midnight.

More than 1 in 4 evening videos got under half their account’s usual views. In the morning it was 1 in 10. Then we went account by account. Of the 16 accounts, 11 posted often enough in the evening and at another time to compare. In 9 of those 11, another time of day had the higher median. We also left out the videos with more than 10 times their account’s usual views, since ads most likely promoted them. The order stayed the same.

Inside each account, the gap between one video and the next was wider than the gap between hours. Whatever the hour, about 1 video in 4 got at least double its account’s usual views. About 1 in 5 got under half.

To find your own time, run a short test.

1. Open TikTok Studio, go to Analytics and open the Viewers tab to see when your viewers are active.
2. Check which clock the chart uses. TikTok says the activity of the people who follow you shows in your phone’s time zone. Other analytics show in UTC, which is 7 hours behind Bangkok.
3. Pick a few windows, such as the morning, the afternoon and the busiest hour in the Viewers tab. Rotate your posts across them for 4 weeks.
4. Wait 1 to 2 days before you read a video’s numbers. TikTok says its analytics can take that long to update.
5. Compare each video with your account’s usual views, and keep the window with the fewest videos under half of it.

How To Schedule A TikTok Post

You schedule a TikTok post in TikTok Studio, which on a computer sits at tiktok.com/tiktokstudio. Upload the video and write the caption as usual, then choose to schedule it instead of posting it now. The video then goes out in the window you tested, even when nobody on the team is at a screen.

How To Measure TikTok Marketing In TikTok Analytics

You measure TikTok marketing in TikTok Analytics, which sits inside TikTok Studio. In the TikTok app, open your profile, tap the menu at the top and choose TikTok Studio. TikTok’s page on account types says you need at least one public post to see analytics.

The account view has 4 tabs. They are Overview, Content, Viewers and a tab about the people who follow the account. Each video also has its own analytics, with an overview, its viewers and its engagement. Every week, read how long people watched and how many watched to the end. Those numbers show whether a video held attention.

Likes alone tell you little. In the same 1,446 brand videos, likes made up 78% of all likes, comments, shares and saves. Shares were 15%, saves 6% and comments under 1%. A brand that judges a video by its comments will see numbers too small to act on. Shares and saves show that a viewer wanted to pass the video on or keep it.

When you need one number to compare videos, use the engagement rate. Add up the likes, comments, shares and saves, then divide by the views. A video with 8,000 views, 240 likes, 4 comments, 44 shares and 32 saves has 320 interactions, which is an engagement rate of 4%. Compare that rate only with other videos on the same account.

How To Get Found In TikTok Search

TikTok search engine optimisation (SEO), or TikTok SEO, gets your videos into TikTok’s search results when people type words about your product. TikTok’s help page on recommendations says its search weighs information about the video most. That includes how well the video matches the words someone typed.

Put the words your customers use in several places. Say them in the video and show them as text on screen. Write them in your captions and use them in a hashtag. Use the words a customer types, such as “how to clean a duvet at home”. Avoid product codes only your team knows.

To find those words, use Creator Search Insights. Search for “Creator Search Insights” in the TikTok app and tap View. The Content gap filter lists topics people search for that have few videos. The capture below is from TikTok’s English help page on the tool.

The same tool has a search analytics view, which shows how your own videos do in TikTok search. Another filter shows what the people who follow you search for, once more than 1,000 people follow the account.

TikTok search and AI answers are separate places. Over the last month, Elevate, Primal’s AI Visibility Tracker, logged 10,083 AI answers across 86 queries about marketing and search. Those answers cited YouTube 1,007 times and tiktok.com 10 times. For ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI Overviews to use your brand’s facts, put the same answers on your website and YouTube too. Our guide to what AI search is explains how those assistants pick their sources.

When To Add TikTok Ads

Add TikTok ads once you know which videos people watch to the end. You also need a place to measure the result. That place can be a website with the TikTok Pixel, a TikTok Shop store or a lead form inside TikTok. Before that, unpaid videos show the team which content holds attention.

A common way to start is Spark Ads, which run an existing post as an ad. The post can be from the brand’s account, or a creator’s post used with their permission. TikTok’s Spark Ads page says the ad’s views, comments, shares, likes and follows are credited to the original post. Run the videos with the longest watch time on your account first. Do that before you make new ads nobody has tested.

Primal runs TikTok accounts and TikTok ads for brands from our Bangkok office. The team handles the videos on the account and the ads that promote them. See how our TikTok ads agency team works, or our social media agency service for the account itself.

Frequently Asked Questions About TikTok Marketing

Customers Often Ask Us Whether TikTok Works For Products People Take Time To Choose

It works at the stage when people are still learning and comparing. A video that explains one point at a time helps viewers remember the brand and search for it later. Measure it by brand searches and website visits after people watch. Let Google and your website serve the people who are ready to decide.

Customers Often Ask Us Whether Staff Should Run Their Own TikTok Accounts

Run one official brand account as the main channel. An account a staff member opens leaves with them when they go. Each of these accounts also describes the brand a little differently. Staff can still make videos, posted on the brand’s account or shared with the brand’s permission.

Customers Often Ask Us Whether To Sell On TikTok Shop Or Our Own Channels

Sell on TikTok Shop when people can buy the product right after a video. The margin per order also has to stay positive after the platform’s fees. For bundles, or products people want to ask about first, send viewers to your website or LINE Official Account. Work out the margin per order on each channel before you decide.

How Often Should A Brand Post On TikTok

Post as often as your team can keep up every week without the videos getting worse. In the brand data above, the middle account posted about 1.3 videos a week. Only 2 of the 16 accounts posted 4 or more. Posting each week also gives you enough videos to compare times and types.

How Does A Brand Get More People To Follow Its TikTok Account

People follow an account when several of its videos help them with the same topic. Make videos as a series with clear episode titles. Pin a video to the profile that says what viewers get from the account. Answer comments with new videos. Then check the tab about the people who follow you in TikTok Analytics to see which videos brought new people to the account.