Love it or hate it, social media is everywhere. What once began as a way for college students to connect with one another has now become an essential tool for marketing your business.
The most popular social media platforms for childcare businesses are Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Although these three are the true social media giants, TikTok has been on the rise: as of 2021, it was the “6th most used social media platform in the world” (Cyca, 2022) and it’s especially popular with younger generations. This makes it the perfect tool to get the word out about your center with young parents!
TikTok is a social media platform that features short videos, live streams, and carousels. In the case of early childhood educators, it can be used to share funny things that have happened in your center, news with customers, or connect with other centers and educators around the world.
TikTok can help your center:
- Collect parent feedback
- Gather new ideas for activities and management initiatives
- Gain more customers
- Connect with others in early childhood education
As with other social media platforms, the details of the TikTok algorithm remain a mystery. All you need to know is that TikTok’s main content feed serves recommendations based on your engagement with other content on the platform. The more you interact with the content, the more TikTok can curate your feed to match your interests and inject new content to spark new interests or highlight what’s trending.
Tips for working with the TikTok algorithm:
- Keep your captions short and engaging
- Hop on trends (sounds, dances, videos)
- TikTok is all about jumping on to trends as soon as they are born
- Find a way to make a trend your own. Try experimenting by making multiple videos and changing one thing (ex: the video background, the wording, the sound, the caption, the hashtags)
- Use hashtags
- You’d be surprised at how much content can be found in a single hashtag
- We recommend using hashtags such as #ece #educator #edutok #childcare #daycare
- Engage with your community
- Follow other educators and accounts in the childcare space (ex: HiMamaApp!). This helps get your own account out there and you can even gain friends in the space!
- Post at the correct times
- There are various tools that can tell you the best time to post, such as Hootsuite. The best way to figure out when you should post would be to determine when your content performs best on TikTok. This can be found using the Business Account settings. Once you’ve posted enough content, the analytics section develops a sense of who your followers are and what they like, including gender, location, and follow activity.
Maintaining professionalism online:
- Determine what type of content you want to post
- This can always change but it’s a good idea to determine if you are willing to post funny and light-hearted posts or if you are sticking to professional content
- Set up a Business Account
- This can be done in TikTok’s settings via the Business Suite. This feature gives you good insights such as analytics, promotion tools, message automation, and more.
Pro tip – cross-promote your center:
- If you already have social media accounts for your center, it’s a good idea to promote your new TikTok account there! You can even repurpose TikToks as Reels to use on Instagram to generate more content and reach more viewers.
TikTok can be a really useful tool for any center director and can provide you with new ideas and customers. Follow @himamaapp on Tiktok, make a video about using our app and tag us so we can follow you on your TikTok journey! We can’t wait to see what you create!
