Auditing Your TikTok Account for Follower Quality (2024)

If you run a business TikTok account, you should carry out regular audits to ensure that you are operating it as effectively as possible. A TikTok audit helps you examine whether you are meeting your business goals or not. It provides you with evidence so you can tweak your TikTok account and its usage. If you just run your account without examining your progress, there is a danger that you will devote time and other resources to a pointless activity that isn’t helping you attain your goals.

One particularly important step of your TikTok audit is to examine the quality of your followers, to determine whether they are of value to you.

Here are the steps to follow each time you carry out a TikTok audit. You should also make similar reviews of your other social media accounts.

The Importance of Auditing Your TikTok Account for Follower Quality:

How to Run a TikTok Audit

In many ways, your TikTok audit will be similar to one you would carry out on Instagram or any other social platform. You are looking for three main things in your audit:

1. That you have set your account up correctly
2. That you consistently release content that will interest your target audience and regularly engage with them
3. That you have a follower base that is authentic and generally represents your target audience

1. Set Your Goals and Target Audience

As with virtually all marketing, you need to set goals for your TikTok account, if you are using it as a business. If you don’t have a purpose for spending time on TikTok, then your time would be better spent doing something more productive.

You will probably have already set business goals, and possibly some overarching marketing goals too. You will want your TikTok account to work towards meeting these overall business and marketing goals.

If you haven’t already established goals, you should do so before going any further. In all cases, you want your TikTok activity to align with both your marketing goals and your overall business goals.

It’s particularly crucial that you stress this to any junior staff member you may have given responsibility for running your business TikTok account. He or she can’t just use the account like their personal account. They have to keep the business goals in mind.

If you haven’t already done so, you should also have determined your target audience. Whom do you want to view your TikTok videos? This will, of course, connect with your goals. It should also have a significant impact both on the nature of the videos you share, and also the types of people you attract as followers. If the demographics of your TikTok followers don’t align with your target audience, then you are not getting your message to the right people.

2. Ensure Your Bio Meets Your Needs

One negative feature of TikTok, from a marketing point of view, is that it provides a spartan bio. This severely limits your ability to customize it compared to many other social media apps. However, it is still prime social real estate, so you need to ensure that every word counts.

As much as possible, match what you use in your bio across the rest of your social accounts. The words might not be identical, but the spirit needs to remain the same. It needs to encapsulate everything important about your brand in only a few words. Describe what you do succinctly.

If you are a sole trader or a business with a clear face representing it, you could upload your photo as your profile image. In most other cases, however, a high-quality logo will be more suitable for a business TikTok account.

3. Check the Overall look of Your TikTok Account

We mentioned your bio above, but that is just part of the overall look and feel of your account. You want your entire TikTok account to convey a particular image to your followers. This look will match the way you want people to look at your business. Perhaps you want them to see you as being young and quirky, or maybe you would prefer to come across as being professional and focused.

You should take an overall look at your TikTok account – including your profile, preferred color scheme, language used, types of videos shared, captions, hashtags, and the way you interact with your followers. You will want everything to be consistent with your brand and match your preferred tone.

You want your TikTok account to have the same look and feel as the rest of your company’s social channels. Sure, the content will be different from what you share on Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook, but the overall look and feel should be similar. If your business has a branding guide, ensure that your TikTok account follows the rules as much as possible. Upload the correct version of your logo and the exact shades of any company colors. Use this color scheme often in your videos.

4. Check the Videos You Post are Consistent with Your Goals

If you’re running your TikTok for any form of marketing activity, it is vital that you consistently align every video you make and share with the goals you set. Again, you need to remember that this isn’t your personal account, so the videos you create, and share must reflect your business goals, rather than simply be on topics you personally like.

Your videos and comments must reflect your company culture. If you aim to come across as professional and wholesome, make sure that you don’t share videos that conflict with that wish. On the other hand, if you target a younger, racier demographic, you can be freer in your video topics and tone of your videos, and you don’t want to come across as too conservative or boring.

Your audience should be able to understand what you have to offer from looking at any video. Take a close look at your most recent videos. Do they tell a consistent tale? Do they follow your aesthetics and branding?

5. Make Sure You’ve Used Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are essential on TikTok. People regularly search for topics on their preferred topics by using hashtags in their searches.

Many brands also create customized hashtags they use on their TikTok posts. It makes it much easier to group all posts relating to your campaigns together.

Hashtags also feature in one of the more popular types of TikTok marketing – hashtag challenges.

Hashtag challenges can be either organic (you find a way to set a challenge to a sizable suitable audience) or paid. TikTok offers hashtag challenges as one of its formal types of advertising. Be aware that paid hashtag challenges are pricey, costing $150,000 for six days, as well as $50,000 to $120,000 for promotion. An organic hashtag challenge can be difficult if you haven’t already built a large following. Sometimes, working with influencers can enable a successful hashtag challenge for a lesser cost than one set up through paid advertising.

6. Check Your Levels of Engagement

To be successful on TikTok, you need to engage with other users. You can’t be an island, merely broadcasting videos that you feel will interest people. That is the quickest way to TikTok obliteration.

Use your TikTok Analytics to help you here. If you haven’t already done so, you will need to switch to a TikTok Pro account to give you access to your account’s analytical dashboard. Another way is to take advantage of some free TikTok analytics tools, which will provide additional analytical data.

Look at the data relating to your most recent videos. Check that you have been responding appropriately to comments, having genuine conversations with your followers. Are you liking and sharing their videos?

Check that you have responded to all your direct messages, and not made people feel that you have ignored them.

7. Assess the Quality of Your Followers

We have already alluded to the importance of having quality TikTok followers. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you check that each of your followers matches your target audience and discourage the “wrong” accounts from continuing to follow you.

It does mean, however, that you should check a random selection of your followers to ensure that they aren’t fake (or indeed, that they are real, but that they have a very high percentage of fake followers to their account). These accounts do nothing to help your credibility.

Signs of Fake TikTok Followers

It is not quite as easy to recognize fake TikTok followers as it is on platforms like Instagram or Facebook – the provided data is not as detailed. Here are some general tips:

1. An Account Has Strange Numbers

Genuine accounts show similar patterns when it comes to follower numbers, people followed, and levels of engagement. Although everybody operates their accounts differently, and some beginners don’t run their accounts like more experienced TikTok users, you can still easily spot outliers.

They may like and follow thousands of people, but don’t have many TikTok users following them in return. Perhaps they don’t share many, if any, videos themselves. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a bot, but it does suggest that they will be of little value as a follower.

2. Short Bursts of Activity

When somebody creates a bot, they will often follow thousands of people at the beginning, and then leave the account alone. They may even share a few videos on the account creation day, before stopping sharing fresh content.

You may see similar patterns recurring when the bot creators bring the account back to life to snare another batch of accounts to follow misleadingly.

3. An Empty Bio

TikTok’s bios are generally short. You only have 80 characters with which to craft your message. Some users write what appears to be nonsense … just because they can. However, you will often find that fake accounts don’t even bother to do that. They leave their bio blank.

You should consider a lack of a profile picture to be a red flag, too, particularly on such a visual platform as TikTok.

4. Clueless Comments

Some fake accounts create comments to make them appear genuine. The problem is that these comments are generic and lack substance. While most TikTok users write relatively brief comments, you want them to at least sound intelligent.

Technically, these comments count as engagement, but they are of little value to a brand that is looking for useful followers who match their target market.

5. Few Original Videos

The whole point of TikTok, of course, is to share short videos. Virtually every user shares some, even if the quality is poor. If you come across an account that has operated for more than a few days, you would expect it to have shared original videos, and you should treat the absence of these as a red flag.