How to make TikTok work for your charity

In November last year, Citizens Advice joined TikTok. As TikTok is new, we weren’t exactly sure what kind of account we’d ‘be’ or if people actually wanted to watch our content. 10 months on and we have a growing audience of over 35,000. Thinking of taking the plunge? Read our tips we’ve learned along the way…

Be flexible with applying your brand

This doesn’t mean throwing your brand guidelines out completely. It’s understanding that TikTok is a very ‘unpolished’ platform. And content that does well on there is personal, authentic, and funny. So if you want to make videos that are well suited to the platform, the less corporate, the better. At Citizens Advice, as long as we’re being helpful, we have the freedom to be more playful.

Got TikTok obsessed colleagues in your team? Let them take control

TikTok trends change a lot. So you always have to be on the lookout for new ideas, hashtags, or sounds. That’s why it’s so important to have a team close to you who use it often. 60% of TikTok users are between the ages of 16 to 24, so if you have team members who are in that audience, rely on them! They’ll help you understand whether your content is relevant or not.

Whilst letting younger team members take the lead is exciting, it also means you’ll need to put a lot of trust in them. A lot of TikToks can be extensions of in-jokes and trends, so sometimes stakeholders won’t always “get” your content. It’s good to be able to remind them of your target audience and that you’ve tested it with people in the same age group.

Get people involved

TikTok is a lot of fun. It can be a great way to work with other teams and be creative. But it can also be a lot of work. Thinking of ideas, filming videos, and posting a few times a week takes a lot of time. So it’s good to have as many hands-on-deck as possible. At Citizens Advice, we have a ‘TikTok action group’. It’s a group of people who we can call on from across the organisation to be in our videos or help come up with ideas. This helps us ensure our videos show lots of different faces. We’ve still got work to do to diversify our account. But the action group is one way we strive to ensure our content relates to as many people as possible.

Make content that is relevant and interesting, even if people have no idea who you are

At the beginning of our TikTok journey, we made videos that didn’t fit with the platform or our target audience. They were corporate. And they relied on the audience having an understanding of our organisation and what we do. After a few months of low engagement, we knew we needed to change something.

We reflected on our initial goal.

“to raise brand awareness and familiarity amongst younger generations.”

So we had a change of tactic. Instead, every time we created content, we asked ourselves.

“Would this be interesting to someone aged 16–25 who had no idea who we were?”

It sounds quite obvious, but we’d been missing it. After trial and error, we created content targeted at issues that were relevant to who we wanted to reach. And we started to create content people wanted to see, even if they had no idea who we were.

And lastly, enjoy it. TikTok can be a fun and exciting new platform, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be for charities too. And don’t forget to follow us @CitizensAdvice to see more educational, fun, and surprising content.