Hey everybody, welcome to our third video
in our TikTok marketing module.
We're gonna change things up a little bit.
As I was putting this slide deck together,
I realized to try and incorporate TikTok
into Google Slides was just a hassle.
It did not look great,
plus it doesn't let you play the videos,
and so I've few introductory slides
of what we're gonna talk about today,
we're gonna be talking about the TikTok strategy
that I came up with
and gonna help shepherd while I was at Bamboo HR
and then we're gonna dig into the actual TikTok channel,
and we're gonna be showing some examples,
and I'm gonna giving you an insights scoop
of kind of why we did the things
the way we did and the wins,
and also very importantly, the losses.
I think that's something that we forget
on social is that we only talk about the wins,
and that's fun and it makes us feel good,
but sometimes we learn more
by the content that doesn't go well,
and sometimes the content we spend a lot of time on,
we do all the research, we do everything right
sometimes it doesn't go well,
and the content we come up with kind of super quickly
and we, you know, post it does the best.
So what am I really trying to say that TikTok
and marketing in general is an art over a science.
So let's get into it though.
We're gonna be talking about
with the Bamboo TikTok strategy.
Let me click through here and then here's some background.
So let's go back now to 2020, 2021.
As we talked about in previous modules,
we were seeing the rise of vertical video
from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
and this new up and coming social media network
called TikTok, and one of the things
that I began to notice as well
is the content that performed well on LinkedIn,
didn't necessarily perform as well
on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
I'm starting to see a lot more walls
between the social channels
and while you should never just copy
and paste things across the social networks
and just post everything the same.
In the last few years it's becoming even more obvious
of the importance of adapting your content
for the needs of the social media channel.
What do I mean by this?
So for example, let's look at TikTok.
It's gonna be all about that vertical short video.
LinkedIn it's gonna be a little bit more
about the longer form video and actually less of video.
LinkedIn video still does well, but it's not the main pieces
of content that does well on LinkedIn.
A lot of it's gonna be more copy based
and also poll question based.
And so long story short, I remember being, you know
in the beginnings of 2021, thinking,
"Okay we're seeing some dips in our overall impressions
and engagement on our social channels."
I think part of that was to do with social fatigue
that we were seeing as the pandemic kind of went on,
and people were on their phones,
but then they were getting burned out
because they couldn't leave their homes.
So long story short
we still needed to find content
that really connected with our audience.
And one thing that I have found when I worked at Bamboo HR
which is an HR software company,
is people cared less about
when we talked about our software,
and they care more about
when we talked about the thought leadership
behind who we were as a company.
They wanted to know how we did HR,
they wanted to know our thoughts about onboarding,
off onboarding, applicant tracking, hiring questions
company culture, all that kind of stuff,
and so that was where we really wanted to shift to.
We still wanted to make sure we showcased our product,
but we wanted to really lead out
with our thought leadership, especially on social media.
And so the summer of 2021
I was able to get my very first intern in my career,
and that was awesome and scary
and crazy all at the same time.
She was fantastic.
She was still in college at the time,
and she came in and you know
she went through the training
and about a month into her internship, she said,
"You know, Tyler I really think TikTok
could be a place for Bamboo HR."
And I'll admit, I thought to myself,
"God I don't know TikTok, it's all about those fancy dances
and those trending sounds, and I just don't feel
like our HR audience is gonna be there."
Foolishly, I was kinda stuck in my ways
and I thought you know,
our audience kinda leans a little older.
They're not gonna be on there, they're more on LinkedIn,
they're surprisingly still on Facebook.
and they were on Instagram,
but as I thought more and more about it,
I thought, well early in my career, I would have loved
for my bosses to give me a chance to really prove
or not prove an idea that I had.
So I told her, "You know, Audrey, great,
you do the research, look for these certain keywords.
You know, I wanted to really understand
you know, our keywords that we were going after, like HR,
company culture, employee experience, things like that,
and come back to me with a plan."
And so she did, she did a fantastic job.
She put together a pitch deck.
I remember she was showing me
some of the hashtags related to HR,
and some of them were in the millions,
and I quickly found as I went through her pitch deck,
"Oh this is a platform that people are really using
to talk about company culture."
TikTok at that time in 2021,
people were using it to talk about the pandemic.
They were using it to talk about Black Lives Matter.
They were using to talk about the future of work,
remote, hybrid, in office,
and social was at the forefront of that.
So I had to swallow my pride a little bit and say,
"Okay let's give it a try."
And that was something that was hard for me,
because TikTok is very personal
and it really does well when it's authentic.
I don't necessarily love being a social media creator,
I'm more of a social media strategist, teacher,
come up with ideas and then allow our design team,
video team to really take the lead on that creating,
but that's something that's really changed
in the last few years.
So where am I getting with all this?
I said, "Let's do it,
let's put together a plan."
And I kind of wanna walk you through those initial videos
that we did, kind of our thought process,
what worked and what didn't work,
and I was gonna show how it evolved
and also what Bamboo HR is doing today.
All right, let's make this a little bigger
so everyone can see.
All right, so let me move myself out of the way here,
maybe I'll just turn myself off here,
so now you can't see me.
Now it's a little bit easier to see everything.
So this is Audrey, she's our wonderful intern
and here's the first TikTok that she made,
and I will admit I was a little nervous,
but she did a great job.
♪ If you're feeling like you need a little bit of company ♪
♪ You met me at the perfect time ♪
♪ You want me ♪
♪ You want me, I want you, baby ♪
♪ If you're feeling like you need a little bit of company ♪
♪ You met me at the perfect time ♪
We'll watch over time.
♪ You want me ♪
♪ You want me, I want you baby ♪
So I think that was successful for a few reasons.
You know, that sound was a trending sound at the time.
She was talking about kind
of this debate that people were having
between remote and in office, about employee benefits,
you know, do you want your snacks
and your free dinners or would you rather have
benefits that actually benefited your life?
But first, Bamboo HR had paid vacation
and they had great in health insurance,
and so this really connected with people.
I mean, our very first TikTok had over 1200 views,
that was awesome.
As soon as I saw that, I said,
"Wow, I think we're onto something."
So I said, "Hey, here's more of our most popular blogs.
Take these blogs, take these ideas,
and let's make a TikTok."
And so that's what she did.
Here's another great example.
This one got 4,000 views.
Not a lot going on around here lately.
Let's see what's behind this door.
(organ music)
Not a lot going on around here lately.
Let's see what's behind this door.
Again, super short, to the point, using qualified sounds,
and it really connected with our audience.
We also tried to fold in
our typical company culture content
like when we had people come back to the office
♪ Patient ♪
♪ Yeah oh I was patient ♪
♪ Oh, now I could scream that we made it ♪
♪ Patient ♪
So you can see here
this was us celebrating everyone coming back
and well we didn't all go back into the office,
it was still a choice that you had,
but you can see here only 445.
So not as well as the other ones,
and you can see here, you know
we had varying degrees of success.
You know, we were starting
to average more in those mid 500s.
She was doing a great job, she was really proud of it
and then she had this one
that just went absolutely viral with 75,000 views.
Just answer the question, okay?
Please don't play with me right now.
Just answer the-
So I think there's a few things we can learn from this.
We had the trending topics,
we also connected with people's love hate relationship
with the hiring process.
She did a great job finding the right hashtags to use.
She had the sound, she had comments
she had everything working for, with 75,000 views.
So this was awesome.
Unfortunately, you know, the internship came to an end,
but we still wanted to make sure
we kinda kept the good times rolling,
but what's interesting, as you can see here
we kinda had a lapse,
and that also is a great learning experience
for me is that TikTok values consistency
and so that's where I dropped the ball,
I was not as consistent as I needed to be.
The next piece of content that we tried out
was more of a day in the life.
This is more of a brand and recruiting play.
[Actress 1] What it's like in life of family HR.
Court hero to work.
[Actress 1] Hurry.
Oh, how are you there?
[Actress 2] So fast.
Make sure we have three sources of water.
[Actress 1] Check.
[Actress 2] Sticky notes.
[Actress 1] Check.
[Actress 2] Can you take the Animals For moral support?
[Actress 1] Check, one pen.
So again, you can see really fun, showing personality,
didn't really hit as much as I wanted it to do.
Later in 2022 we had our employee experience week,
where we worked with HR influencers,
where we had them create TikToks
and talking about their thought leadership.
Again, it didn't do as well,
I was pretty bummed about this.
Why didn't it do well?
I think we weren't consistent in our posting.
I don't think TikTok really understood
what we were trying to do.
I think if I could go back and do it again,
I'd have them make multiple videos that were shorter
and that we could hit a little bit harder and quicker.
What was really interesting, they didn't do well on TikTok,
but they did a lot better on Instagram,
and I think one of the reasons why is because,
we had a larger audience that was a lot more engaged,
and so that played a role in it as well,
but then you can see here, we continue
to mess around with a wide variety of formats.
You can see here we started to getting into the paid game.
So this had over a half a million, but that was paid,
and we switched to really focusing on people
and that was a thing that, you know, I started,
and it's cool to see that they're still doing that today.
Always focus on people,
you'll never go wrong when you do that,
and it's also important to remember
if things don't go well, keep going, keep trying.
I always like to use the baseball analogy, you know
a Hall of Fame baseball player, if they hit, you know
four outta 10, they're a Hall of Famer,
and I think social is very similar.
You're not gonna hit home runs every single time,
so don't get discouraged,
and I still follow Bamboo HR on TikTok
and it's really fun to see.
Now what's interesting here is they then switched
to more of a actor,
I would say, less authentic, more produced,
and it'd be like, "Wow, Tyler, look
they had 1.4, 1.2 million, it's doing really well."
All this was paid.
They work with an agency to promote this across the board,
which is great, but they can see
when they're not being paid, they're back down,
and this is when they're repurposing podcast content.
So, you know, if I could go back to them now, I'd say,
"You know, I think we need to go back
to having a point person with trending sounds and in topics.
I feel like that's something that's lacking.
It works, it takes consistency
but I think it's something
that people can really respond to
and that's what they want to see on TikTok."
So without further ado, that concludes our third video.
Well, I'm really excited now to see what you guys can do
with creating your own TikTok content.
So let's get into that.
Thanks everybody, see ya in video four.