TikTok is a social media platform where people are building strong personal brands. Influencers, business owners and entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk have invested in TikTok personal branding to support their personal goals and professional endeavors.
TikTok’s short form video content format is highly engaging, leading people to spend hours discovering useful and entertaining content. This content format paired with TikTok’s content discovery algorithm lends itself well for personal branding, as individuals can use the platform’s content creation and distribution tools to increase engagement and establish a following.
“How-to” style content, videos sharing advice, and behind the scenes content are content types that TikTok is known for. These popular TikTok content styles also happen to present a plethora of potential personal branding content ideas for creators.
Similar to the way in which influencers utilize platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn to develop their personal brands, entrepreneurs and business professionals from various fields are telling their stories on TikTok, raising awareness for themselves and their businesses, and monetizing their personal brands.
Whether you are trying to build a personal brand in order to grow a business, or are looking to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, TikTok is a great place to start. In order to do so, consider these TikTok personal branding content ideas for building your own brand on TikTok.
Speaking of brand storytelling, a key element of a personal brand is sharing relatable information. Your personal brand doesn’t have to be all business, and the odds are adding personal elements will only increase how much people engage with you as they discover commonalities. Gary Vaynerchuk exemplifies this in his personal brand, posting about his passion for the New York Jets NFL football team, and his hobbies like trading cards and flipping garage sale items.
TikTok Storytelling Ideas
To tell your own story, try adding these ideas to your TikTok content strategy:
Check out this blog post to learn about the benefits of personal branding: The Benefits of Personal Branding.
Interviewing someone in a podcast-style video format is a TikTok content style that appears to be resonating with viewers. This example from VaynerMedia where they interview the Chief Marketing Officer from MetLife about marketing funnels. Using a split screen technique or POV interview where only the person you are interviewing is on screen, you can bring fresh content to your audience by focusing on a new perspective from a 3rd party.
This will especially be valuable if you are able to bring in a thought leader or prominent figure from your industry. This could be a win-win for them, too, as they will get exposure to your audience.
TikTok offers ample opportunity for visual branding. Try creating simple graphics or your own to include within your videos to up your TikTok personal branding game.
TikTok Visual Branding Opportunities
Try taking advantage of these visual branding opportunities within your personal branding content strategy:
Get more visual personal branding tips in this blog post: 7 Personal Branding Tips to Help Grow Your Audience and Influence.
Sharing predictions opens up a ton of personal branding content ideas. You will see this with prevalent thought leaders and influencers, as they frequently share their future predictions for their industry. Identifying trends, opportunities, or upcoming challenges and sharing them with your audience puts you in a position of being a thought leader. Not only will this content come across as valuable insight for your audience, it also has the chance of sparking conversation.
For the marketing industry, an example would be predicting that SMS, voice, and automated customer experience technologies will grow in popularity among marketers in the next year. Think about parallel predictions like those examples for your own industry, and share them in a TikTok video.
Use our personal brand framework to further define your personal brand and its associated content strategy.
Regardless if the goal is business growth or personal brand development, providing value to your target audience should be at the core of every TikTok personal branding content strategy. One way to accomplish this is to help people by answering their questions.
When questions, trends, or controversial topics arise in your industry, it’s an opportunity for you to weigh in and help people to make sense of them. An example for Brand Credential would be posting a video explaining the key things to consider when selecting the social channel that is most appropriate for your company.
This technique can be executed on TikTok by restating a question you’ve heard elsewhere, and providing your own answer, or answering questions you see posed in other people’s videos and comments.
When trends or controversial topics arise in your industry, there’s an opportunity for industry experts to weigh in and help make sense of it for their audiences. For example, when new social media platforms launch and gain popularity, professionals in the marketing industry share their opinion on the platform’s benefits and downsides, and report on their early experiences with the platform. An example in the food and restaurant industry would be sharing posts that offer commentary on the rising popularity of app-based delivery services.
Keep your ear to the ground for similar topics and news moments in your own industry, and take the opportunity to share your thoughts on them. This will generate conversation among your peers, and well thought out takes on the trends will help to establish your reputation as a thought leader.
Sharing thought leadership content, news and updates from 3rd party creators and brands in your industry makes for engaging content that you always have at your disposal when you need an idea for a post, and it also gets people in the habit of coming to you for thought leadership content.
Using TikTok’s repost feature, you can share posts from other creators with your audience. While these posts do not appear on your profile, your followers do see them. This means they can act as a low hanging fruit touch point in your content creation strategy.
If you are going to repost on TikTok, be sure the content matches your personal brand’s usual message and style, so as not to confuse your followers or seem random.
A classic marketing strategy among B2B companies on other social media channels, highlighting customers and colleagues is a content technique that also has value for personal brand development on TikTok.
From a customer perspective, sharing news from your customers, highlighting the success they’re found with your products, and communicating your appreciation has the dual benefit of making them feel valued, and highlighting your own business success.
In terms of highlighting colleagues, try posting a video that showcases their work, shouting them out and showing appreciation for their insight, or explaining one of their recent products or company news moments. This will create dialogue and encourage engagement on their part, while demonstrating the value of your own network. An example of this could be posting a review video on a new product launched by one of your partner companies or peers.
It is no surprise that the best personal brands come across as personal. These individuals communicate tangible value, and manage to do so in a way that exudes their own personal touch.
A content topic that can help you accomplish this within your own TikTok personal branding is behind-the-scenes content. Just as businesses often share an inside look at their day-to-day operations to build brand loyalty with their customers, you can share your own behind-the-scenes updates.
An example of this strategy being applied on Twitter went viral when Yehong Zhu, founder of Zette, posted a Twitter thread that offered a behind the scenes look at what her day is usually like as a startup founder in Silicon Valley. This content idea was well received, as her peers were able to relate, and other members of her audience were able to learn about what it’s like having that job role.
To apply this idea on TikTok, you could create a video with a series of scenes documenting different parts of your day like this VaynerMedia employee did with his office tour, showcase how products are made, explain what it’s like running your business, or any other aspects of your profession that you think your audience would find value in seeing firsthand.
If you are a professional seeking to build your thought leadership footprint, you can share the daily routines that you find to be most effective, or explain how you’ve overcome common challenges in your industry. An example of this would be a marketing professional explaining the steps that went into a recent product launch, and asking colleagues how they would have approached it, or suggestions they have for future product launches.
Regardless of what content you share with this strategy, the goal is to share a personal perspective that will make you and your personal brand relatable.
Every industry, hobby and profession has common pain points and things we enjoy about our respective niche that brings people together and creates common ground. This common ground can be leveraged to create humorous memes on TikTok. For example, remote work memes became common across social media platforms since the shift to hybrid and remote work. Kids in the background of Zoom calls, people apologizing for being on mute every call, etc.
This meme example from SEMrush showcases this TikTok content idea in action, as their social media team created a meme with a humorous portrayal of a situation many people can relate to: receiving a work call before you’ve had your morning coffee.
Find a meme idea that’s relatable for your niche audience, or think of your own that will resonate with them, and create it in a TikTok video format.
TikTok has emerged as a platform for personal brand development that presents users with engaging content options to create and share with followers. Take advantage of these tips and TikTok personal branding content ideas for building your own brand on the platform.
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Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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