A company TikTok account and the first 90 days

Setting up a business TikTok account takes about ten minutes. After that comes the part that decides the outcome: three months of publishing while nobody is clapping yet.

The short answer to the account type question: choose a business account if you are marketing in the company's name and intend to buy advertising at some point. Write in the bio, in one line, what you sell and to whom, put the link straight to the page you want traffic on, and publish three to five videos a week for the first three months. The rest of this article is reasoning and pitfalls.

We do this work for more than 30 partners and generate more than seven million views a month for them. What follows is based on what actually happens at the start, not on what TikTok's guidelines say.

Business account or regular account

A business account is the default choice for a company. It unlocks analytics, allows a link in the profile, connects to TikTok Ads Manager and adds a contact button to the profile. Without these you cannot buy distribution and you cannot see where the views come from.

One difference is worth knowing in advance. A business account uses a music library licensed for commercial use, which means the most popular hit songs are not available. A creator account has more songs, but a company that uses them in its marketing takes on the copyright risk itself. In practice this means the sound cannot be the only idea in your videos. If the concept collapses without a trending song, the concept is the problem.

The account type can be switched in the settings in both directions, so the choice is not final. It is still not free: switching cuts off some of the analytics views and muddles the tracking right at the point when data would start building up. Decide once and stick with it.

Profile and bio: what actually goes there

The bio is short. There is no room for a value proposition, a mission or three hashtags. Write two things in it: what you sell and to whom. The rest is wasted.

The username has to be the same as on your other channels, preferably just the brand name with no underscores or numbers. For the profile picture, a logo that is recognisable at thumbnail size, because that is the size it appears at in the feed. The link goes where you actually want to send people, not to the home page. If the video talks about one product, the link should point to that product.

One thing that is almost always forgotten: pin three videos to the top row of the profile that say who you are. A new viewer decides whether to follow in a few seconds, and the pinned videos are the only thing you can influence in that moment. Change them when your offering or the season changes, because they go stale without anyone noticing.

The first 30 days: volume before polish

The first month is about collecting material. You do not know what works, and a guess is a poor substitute for data. Three to five videos a week means around 15 videos a month, which is a big enough sample to see directions.

Publish different types of video on purpose: the product in use, the people behind the company, answers to customers' questions, something funny. Do not make 15 versions of the same idea and conclude from that that TikTok does not work in your industry.

The start can be faster than you expect if production is in order from the beginning. Traveller got more than 500,000 views from its first two posts and OnePlus Finland's first four videos collected 131,000 views. Neither was a quick experiment snapped on a phone, but a scripted and planned batch. If you are starting on your own, the basics of making your first videos are worth reading before you buy any equipment.

What to measure between day 30 and day 90

Follower count is a poor metric. It moves slowly, it says nothing about sales and it makes you quit too early.

Look at these instead:

• how many people watch the video to the end, because that decides distribution
• how many people watch the video again
• profile visits relative to views, meaning whether the interest carries over to the account
• link clicks and what follows from them on the website
• search terms and comments, because they tell you what the audience is really asking

At the three-month mark a direction should be visible, not a final result. OnePlus Finland's organic visibility grew by 650%, but that growth was built on top of a pile: before it, a batch of videos had been made, not all of which worked. The same applies to Hans Välimäki's account, where 41 short videos produced 3.2 million views. The third video says nothing about the result, the thirtieth does.

If revenue impact is what you have to report upwards, agree the measurement method before the first post. Afterwards it is always an argument. The choice of metrics, and why the platform's own report is not enough for decision-making, is covered in more detail in the article measuring social media marketing. Tässä artikkelissa riittää yllä oleva viiden kohdan lista.

Posting pace and who handles it

Three to five videos a week means three to five ideas, scripts, shoots, edits and posts a week. That is a real workload, not a side task of the marketing budget. Most often a business TikTok account dies because it was handed to someone on top of their other work.

There are three options: someone inside the company does it as their main job, you hire your own creator, or you buy production from outside. The cost calculation for an in-house hire should be done honestly, because the salary is the smallest item in it. If you want to compare what ongoing short-form video production includes compared with buying individual videos, the difference lies precisely in who is responsible for the posting pace when things get busy.

The most common mistakes on a business TikTok account

An ad in the form of a video. If the video starts with a logo and continues with product features, it is an ad, and ads belong in paid distribution. On an organic account the first second has to be earned.

Cross-posting between channels. A video downloaded from Instagram with a watermark performs poorly on TikTok, and the same goes the other way round. The same raw material works, the same finished file does not.

Leaving comments unanswered. Comments are free distribution and free customer research. They are also the place where the buying decision is often made.

Abandoning the account after the sixth video. This is the most common of these. The number of posts in the first 90 days predicts the outcome better than any single video.

Putting paid distribution in the wrong place. Move to advertising only once you know which organic content works, and then advertise that. The media budget is a different thing from production, and it should be kept separate in the accounts too. Otherwise the cost of production looks bigger the more advertising you buy.

When not to set up a business TikTok account

In these situations the answer is no.

If you cannot commit to six months, do not start. Three months is the minimum for seeing a direction, and six is what it takes to see a result. A two-month trial almost always produces the conclusion "it did not work for us", and that conclusion is wrong.

If all your customers come from three salespeople's networks and a single deal is worth hundreds of thousands, your time is probably better spent elsewhere. TikTok is a volume channel.

If your product cannot take a close-up, fix the product first. Short-form video is an honest medium, and it shows things as they are.

If nobody in the company is willing to appear on camera and there is no budget for an external creator, the account stays empty. Faces are not compulsory for everything, but there has to be something, and a product photo on a spinning background is not enough.

If the budget only stretches to one channel and that channel is already paying off, do not split it. The Instagram Reels versus TikTok comparison is worth doing before opening the account, not after.

Where to start

Set up the account this week, write in the bio in one line what you sell and to whom, and publish five videos before you analyse anything at all. The first 90 days are a building phase, not a test phase.

If you want to go through your own situation before you decide on the pace or on who does the work, book a meeting. We will go through what is worth doing for your target group and what is not, and we will say directly if this is not the right channel for you. You can see prices and packages in the the price list.