TikTok has a huge viewership. In January 2022, it has grown its user base to one billion, so no wonder that you want to leverage as many people from it as you possibly can.
Reaching and influencing a global audience or an audience from a specific country is an actionable way to grow your TikTok content reach and followership.
💡Suggested read: How to Get More TikTok Followers
However, it’s quite tricky to do on TikTok. Here’s why.
Why Is It Complicated to Reach Audiences from Other Countries on TikTok?
When you just start your account, TikTok promotes your local content by default. It shows you the videos made in the language of your country of residence made by creators within this area.
The platform prioritises its recommendations based on your location, so it’s immune to VPNs. Therefore, it won’t change your feed recommendations or start promoting your content right after you log in with another IP address provided by VPN.
Besides, TikTok recommends content based on the phone number you entered upon creating your account. This is why VPN often doesn’t work after the account has already been created. Users note this problem is prevalent on iPhones.
How to Reach a Global Audience or Audience of a Specific Country on TikTok
Although it’s complicated, it’s not improbable to reach audiences outside your country. Here are the hacks you should try.
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These are easy to leverage, but they will gradually change the algorithm of your profile, showing your content to global audiences and recommending content from creators within other countries. Using these tips, don't expect promt changes.
- Use hashtags in the language of the country you are targeting. For example, if you’re from Germany and want to reach American followers, use relevant tags in English.
- Create captions and on-video text in the same target language.
- If you talk in your videos, you should do it in the target language.
- Take part in the TikTok challenges that are currently on the run in your target country.
- Engage (like, follow, and comment) creators and influencers from target countries as soon as you come across them on TikTok. Ideally, their audience should be relevant to your account.
- Search for the content in the target language by entering relevant keywords into the search field.
- Change your account language to the target one.
- Change the location in your phone settings.
To summarise the idea, you need to tailor your content to the specific local audience, knowing what they like to watch, which languages they speak, which creators they follow, which tags they use, which memes they laugh at, and so on.
This approach worked for the Combin TikTok page when we tried to cover audiences from the US.
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More Radical Ways to Influence Global Audiences on TikTok
If your SIM card is connected to a certain area, your phone automatically gives data about your whereabouts. This is how to bypass it:
- Take out your SIM card from the smartphone.
- Download any VPN of your choice and install it on your smartphone. In our example, we use Express VPN.
3. Select the desired location. For instance, Paris, France.
4. Select the same location in your smartphone settings.
5. Delete the TikTok application and upload it again. Launch it.
6. Select the language as French if not yet done automatically by TikTok.
7. Create a TikTok account.
If you already have an account, create several videos from a ‘new’ location, writing hashtags, captions, and the whole video content in French. Again, no other language should be used in your content.
8. Publish the video and wait.
Ideally, these steps should be taken when you create a new TikTok account; this will be more efficient. Yet, users say that this approach might work for an existing account alike, although it will take more time. Remember to be consistent (duh!) and publish videos using this hack as often as you can.
Thus you’ll be able to bypass TikTok smart algorithms.
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Another way is pretty similar to the one above, but it’s even more radical.
- Install VPN on your new phone (just bought or rebooted).
- Choose the country you want to and download TikTok from the applications store in your smartphone settings. Change your location in the applications store as well, if applicable.
- Sign up for TikTok. You need to create a new account. The platform should automatically detect the country.
- Upload a video with the hashtags, captions, and other metadata in a target language.
It should be discovered by the audience you’ve chosen when registering your account.
Some other ways are to buy a SIM card with the phone number of a target country or even buy a burner phone number of a particular country that you will use only once for creating this account. But the latter might lead to complications if or when TikTok asks you to confirm your number with a code sent to this phone.
Similar articles on this subject claim that posting from the TikTok web version with the VPN on might work, but we’ve tried it, and it didn’t. The same is for video drafts posted after the VPN was on without a SIM card.
How Combin Promoted Its TikTok Account Across the US Audience
We created our TikTok account two years ago. The Combin team is based in Europe, but most of our users are from the US, so it was crucial for us to reach the American audience.
Expectedly, we encountered the same issues the majority of users did when it came to influencing audiences outside of their country of residence. Namely, in the beginning, we were shown to the European audiences only, primarily from Germany.
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To bypass it, here's what we did:
- Used mass liking and mass following of American creators and brands. TikTok doesn't yet penalise for this.
- Made videos in English with all metadata in the English language.
- Made duets with American TikTokers.
- Turned airplane mode on when creating videos on TikTok.
- Tried to upload and make videos with a VPN and changed the location in the smartphone settings.
As a result of the combo of these actions, we noticed that our videos were discovered by Americans in a couple of months, and we obtained US clients from TikTok. The results aren't instant but there are some.
The Bottom Line
So if you want to reach an audience from other countries on TikTok, it’s not impossible; however, tricky. The most important thing you should remember is that your content should be tailored to the audience for which you’re shooting the videos. All these technical loops might or might not work, but if the content is not of interest to the particular region, everything will be in vain.
⚡️So consider these as takeaways:
- Create your videos in the required language.
- Write metadata and captions in this language.
- Track your stats constantly to see what works and what doesn’t. Track the location of your new followers.
- Create the content on topics that are interesting in this particular place. Before that, you should research the content of this country and see what the residents like.
- Engage with local influencers and creators.
Hope you’ll find this advice insightful and happy TikTok growth!