As consumers become increasingly supportive of brand underdogs and TikTok small businesses boom, the platform is playing into this evolving allegiance and refreshing its historic facilitation of unexpected virality and account discovery. 

As an audio-first platform that rewards users who creatively adopt viral sounds, TikTok is nurturing small businesses by expediting their creative processes and boosting their shot at virality. In its partnership with Elias Audio Branding, a subsidiary of Universal Production Music, the platform has crafted 10 custom sounds that include a combination of music, voice overs and directional cues that can be used in organic and paid content. The audio cache is part of TikTok’s vast Commercial Music Library, which brands can consult for pre-cleared sounds to avoid the licensing process. Since its launch, Sounds For Business have ranked in the top 1% of sounds with the top creates, views, likes and shares in the library of 1.5 million songs.

Borrowing language from long-established TIkTok trends, titles including “Pack an Order,” “Meet The Team” and “Reasons To Shop Small” offer social media managers starting points for introducing content formats that users have already approved. 

Elevating time optimization

Clint Wetherill and Scott Adams, who own a full-service real estate brokerage firm, have amassed 112,000 followers by using TikTok to promote their podcast. Wetheril, who predicted that 25% of the business’ sales will come directly from TikTok in the next year, acknowledged the audio library as a useful template for accelerating content creation. 

“Spreading basic financial literacy isn’t necessarily our field of business, but it’s what TikTok is asking for,” said Wetheril. “We saw that it’s what the community wants and needs, but it’s hard to always come up with these ideas and script and shoot when you’re running a full-time business” 

Among small businesses that run ads on the platform, 78% say they’ve realized a positive ROI, according to software marketplace Capterra’s 2022 TikTok marketing survey. TikTok has worked to celebrate this success—the platform recently elevated local businesses through its Gridiron Grub Contest, selecting three winners based on content with “creativity, storytelling and food appeal.” One recipient was Empamamas owner Stephanie Swanz, who uses TikTok to both entertain consumers and educate them about her product.

TikTok’s Promote feature, which was introduced earlier this month, provides users with more ways of boosting their content organically and offers specific benefits to small businesses—they can use new location services to directly target their local communities and accounts that rely on individual customer interactions to make sales that drive traffic directly to their inboxes. Instead of sticking to big brands or their typical purchasing patterns, 58% of users say they discover new brands and products on the platform, posing an opportunity for TikTok to please both consumers and businesses by catalyzing business growth.