Some context:

His local small business is located in Brunei.

The boomer I speak of is my dad.

Okay, fine, so I had full control of what to post, when to post, how to post. I know my dad’s business and I thought, hah, this should be a breeze.

It was not.

Not at the beginning at least.

It was daunting. I kept asking around if TikTok even worked in Brunei.

My friends and even some of the younger audience said yes.

My dad’s target has always been people above 30. People with family. Not Gen Zs who are looking for minimalistic or Instagrammable stores.

But I pointed out to my dad that one day his customers — who are from the Gen Z category — will have their own families. And we need to start reaching out to them.

Enter: TikTok.

A Quick Breakdown About Why A Small Business Needs To Be On TikTok

While people around me kept saying that TikTok is the place to be, like a good content marketer, I first did some additional snooping around.

As mentioned above, my immediate association with TikTok was that it was a platform for the young ones. Not people in their 30s like me.

Right?

Nope.

First things first. TikTok has some 600 million people on it. Now all of these people cannot be Gen Zs, right?

Right. Because according to Statista (2000), only 62% of TikTok users — in this case in the U.S. — are between the ages of 10 to 29.

So yes, the majority of TikTok users are NOT in my dad’s target group.

But that didn’t stop me.

Because the number of adults using TikTok (again, in the U.S.) has been growing year on year.

Okay, a good sign, right?

I’m sure the same can be said of Brunei.

But … still … should I?

Is the TikTok audience looking for soft furnishing or home interior videos?

Apparently, yes. It’s the fourth most sought-after category.

Plus, it’s a fast-growing brand. It is predominantly used by females (most of my dad’s target decision-makers are females). And is an extremely interactive platform that is gaining a lot of engagement.

Now with all that research done, it was clear.

We had to kickstart our brand’s TikTok account.

And we did.

If you’re on the fence about starting a TikTok account for your product- or service-based brand, ask yourself these questions:

1. Are your existing customers on TikTok? (A good way to find out if your current pool of customers is even interested in TikTok content. If they all say no, then TikTok is not for you)
   
   
2. Is your target audience on TikTok? (As mentioned above, TikTok is more popular with the younger crowd BUT there are also small pools of people who are actively looking for quality content regardless of demographics)
   
   
3. Is there a demand for content from your niche? (Check the popular categories on TikTok but also bear in mind that just because your product/service isn’t in demand, it doesn’t mean it won’t grow — it could be your unique selling point or you may just need to put a new spin on it)
   
   
4. Do you have the resources to create TikTok videos? (If you work solo or are part of a small team, please be aware that it takes time to plan and create TikTok videos. If you already have a huge following elsewhere, reassess if you even have the time or resource to be on TikTok)

Clearly, all the above checked well for me (and my dad’s business).

The first thing I did to start? Download TikTok.

My Journey on TikTok & Stuff I Learned

So here’s the deal.

I jumped on TikTok with a bit of research on whether it’ll even be worth it or not, but I had ZERO clue as to how to work the app.

Seriously, I had not even “played” with on another person’s phone or anything before this.

I spent a good hour or so tinkering around the app when I downloaded it.

I created the profile, then browsed through other accounts.

I tried to figure out how to start a video but I got so overwhelmed that I just SHUT IT OFF.

Man, this is really not for people in their 30s, is it?

Fortunately for me, I have a group of amazing ladies – my business besties. I’ve spoken about them before in the article I wrote about my LinkedIn challenge.

One of them, Renee from PeachyPixx, was already on TikTok — and she was actively trying to find ways to get others to jump on it, too. After all, she’s a videographer by profession and TikTok is all about videos.

It made sense for her.

I shared my plight with them and Renee stepped up.

She decided to run a quick challenge for us — just like how I did one for them for LinkedIn.

Gotta love business buddies, no?

5 days later, I felt like a professional TikToker.

Sure, my content wasn’t the best. Neither did it go viral. But for a small business that just started on TikTok, we were already getting 200+ videos per video.

I was over the moon.

I wrote down more content ideas, researched sound, listed down what other accounts in our niche were doing.

Then Renee approached me privately and asked if I wanted to share this cheat sheet I had created for myself (and future clients) in her TikTok course.

ERM, YES PLEASE.

How You Can Get Started On TikTok, Too

So after about a week of polishing up my cheat sheet, I passed it to Renee, and together, we launched the Kickstart Your Brand’s TikTok course.

What do you get in it?

Renee has recorded a lot of videos on how you can succeed on TikTok.

She has step-by-step instructional videos to guide you with creating different types of TikTok content. She even has a 5-day PDF (the same one I used to start) that spells out exactly what you need to do in the first 5 days of registering your brand’s TikTok account.

After that, you can download my cheat sheet which has a list of sounds and content ideas that are suitable for both product-based and service-based brands.

This means if you’re a home-based business selling cookies, stationery, apparel or food — this is for you. (Note: I started TikTok for a retail business that sells products)

Or if you’re a content creator, graphic designer, virtual assistant, social media guru, coach — this is for you, too. (Note: Renee started her TikTok for her own business — she’s a solopreneur — teaching people about videography)

Best of both worlds.

Get the Kickstart Your Brand’s TikTok course here.

My LinkedIn Journey: The Turning Point

I signed up for LinkedIn somewhere in 2010.

I know, talk about being an early adopter.

Unfortunately, I didn’t do much with it. I suppose the force just wasn’t very strong with LinkedIn back then.

It was more about being seen on Facebook (and then we all know what happened there).

Sometime during the whole COVID-19 lockdown situation, I decided to finally suck it up and get myself a mentor for my writing career.

My business was slow, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that when there aren’t many clients, it’s a great excuse to use the downtime to upgrade yourself.

Long story short, my mentor, Pete Boyle suggested that we get on LinkedIn. To start posting more regularly. To share what we do, what we learn, and the whole deal.

So I tried.

I wasn’t one of those who could post every day because *insert some lack-of-motivation reason here*.

So I started with two posts per week.

Within one month, I had 15 new followers.

Not bad, I thought.

Two months later, another 15 followers joined.

PLUS, two old acquaintances (one ex-coursemate from college and one ex-colleague) reached out and asked if I was looking for writing stints.

OF COURSE, I SAID YES.

I couldn’t believe it. Was that all it took to make LinkedIn work for you?

I’ll be lying if I said yes. It’s more than that.

There’s a lot of things that could make your LinkedIn profile great. But I found a formula for myself after about 6 months.

3 Ways To Make Your LinkedIn Shine

1. Stay consistent. Find a frequency that works for you and keep posting (mine’s two posts a week, minimum).
   
2. Share your story. Share what you’ve learned, even a personal story (positive or negative), and when you’re tired, curate and add your comments and thoughts.
   
3. Engage when you have the time. Like another person’s post, start following thought leaders in your niche and comment on their posts, connect with old classmates, colleagues, people you bumped into, and I don’t know, past Tinder dates, maybe? (Ok, maybe not, hah!)

I’ll be very honest. I have moments where I just don’t feel like doing any of the above.

But that’s just because I’m human.

You’ll feel it, too.

My suggestion? If you don’t feel like a post is authentic/genuine, skip. Consider it a cheat day. Go read a book, eat some cake, do something else. Don’t post.

After more than 6 months of giving LinkedIn some much due attention, I must say it works.

I even got some of my friends to try it. I came up with a bunch of topics and threw together a quick “7 day LinkedIn challenge” for them and their posts got some good engagement, plus their followers and connections soared.

Keep reading if you want the prompts that I shared with them.

What You Should Know About Posting On LinkedIn

Before you go jumping on to LinkedIn, spamming your account with “buy this” or “hire me” messages, there are some things you need to know.

45% of decision makers say thought leadership compelled them to invite an organization to bid on a project when not previously considering them, and 57% of say thought leadership directly led to awarding business. — LinkedIn

So yes, you don’t want to miss out on what LinkedIn has to offer.

Whether you’re a solopreneur, freelancer, entrepreneur, consultant, creative, independent business owner, C-level manager, etc, with LinkedIn, you can:

• Build thought leadership for yourself or your brand
• Share your views, corporate culture to get more followers
• Gain a competitive advantage amongst peers
• With more followers, you build more career opportunities (companies can recruit better, employees can hope for promotions)
• With more content, you also improve customer acquisition and retention as people start to know, like and trust you better (for businesses)

Whether your end goal is to improve recruitment or retention, build thought leadership or generate leads or traffic, start by sharing more content on your LinkedIn.

Forget the algorithm and the analytical mess, talk about issues that are relevant and timely. Add your take on what’s trending.

Develop your personal brand.

What You Should Do Before Starting To Post On LinkedIn

Review your profile

Have you updated your profile recently?

Check your employment history, add more details in your bio. Put up a new and professional looking profile picture.

Clean your account so when you start posting, and people check your profile out, they’re reading your most updated profile and can connect with you if they want.

Ensure your posts are public

I wasn’t aware of this earlier but someone DM-ed me on LinkedIn after reading my posts and told me to do this (thank you, Hanafi!).

Go to your LinkedIn Settings, and go under Visibility to ensure your profile and posts are public. Do also allow Everyone to follow you.

Record your statistics

I’m so glad I did this from the start.

I didn’t want to make it a formal affair since I was the only one monitoring this, so I just opened up a notepad document and recorded my follower count whenever I remembered.

On 18th September 2019, I had 460 followers.

As of publishing this article, I have 598 followers.

No, that’s not a huge jump. But it’s a pretty significant increase for someone who posts two times a day and does it all organically.

But how do I maintain these consistent postings?

The Content Strategy I Use for LinkedIn Posts

Always have a content strategy! So important.

I mentioned this earlier. Pick a frequency and stick to it. Share your story, and engage.

My strategy was simple.

Have a few content buckets.

• Write and share personal business/content marketing lessons
• When in doubt, repurpose Instagram/newsletter content into LinkedIn
• When in a rush, curate an article from the internet and add my words

That’s it. With these three buckets in mind, I would post whatever I felt like for the week. I typically wrote something on the weekend and scheduled it on Hootsuite, but sometimes I just wrote when I felt like it and hit publish on LinkedIn.

Keep it real, yo.

I was sharing this strategy with my business buddies group and they said they wanted to start/restart their LinkedIn progress, too.

They were struggling to think of what to post, even with the strategy above (it doesn’t have topics), so I came up with a list of topics for them.

Here it is for you to use.

Like my content so far? Buy me a cuppa, maybe?

BONUS: The 7-Day LinkedIn Post Challenge (with Prompts)

1️⃣ Post 1: Introduce/reintroduce yourself

New to LinkedIn? Tell everyone who you are, what you do, your personal or professional goals.

Been on LinkedIn for a while but been quiet? Reintroduce yourself with the same structure as above.

Renee tackled this post idea with a short, sweet and straight to the point post:

2️⃣ Post 2: Share why you’re on LinkedIn

Tell people why you’re on LinkedIn. Are you looking to connect with certain types of people? Do you want to learn? Are there people whose progress you want to follow (tag them!)?

I love how Feetri made her post so relatable:

3️⃣ Post 3: Share experience/lessons

Talk about how your working experience has been so far. Share some lessons you took from past experiences that you utilise in your current role/business.

4️⃣ Post 4: Share your first work experience

I found this super fun. It tells people how your first experience was and how far you’ve come along. Some tips to share:

• When did you get your first client/job?
• How did you feel?
• What do you do differently today when onboarding?
• Ask: “Tell me your story!” (Tag people whose story you want to read)

Liyana was so authentic when she shared her story:

5️⃣ Post 5: “I wish I knew sooner”

Talk about things you wish you knew sooner. A lesson or a process.

Tag the person who shared/taught you the lesson.

Optional: talk about your service/product and how it helps people who help people who have this same problem and how you help to solve it.

Much love to Azurah who used this topic to share her experience when working with me:

6️⃣ Post 6: Share a statistic from your niche

This is a curated post. Find an article from the internet about your niche and some latest statistics.

In the post, share:

• Why is the statistic is so important?
• Ask: agree or disagree?

Here’s what I wrote for this topic:

7️⃣ Post 7: Your goal to continue posting on LinkedIn

Tell people how fun it has been to share, and how you want to keep sharing.

Tips about this post idea:

• Tag people whose posts you always look forward to reading.
• Ask: what topics from your niche would others like to read about?

Adilah kept it simple when she wrote this post:

Easy, isn’t it?

Drop a comment below and let me know if this challenge worked for you.

Done with your 7 days challenge? Need more help to write out your LinkedIn posts? Let’s chat!

1. Wrong target audience — which was highly unlikely because I was only speaking with people from their very specific industry, or
   
2. The website itself wasn’t doing a great job.

I repeatedly made suggestions to improve the website.

Most of them were implemented, although it took too long sometimes. All the while, they kept asking me to prove the marketing best practices that I was using — and I couldn’t because once again, I had no analytics to show that my strategies were or weren’t working.

So I did what I could. I asked for a budget to bring in a marketing agency. Two, in fact. One that would help us with auditing the website and SEO efforts, and one who would help with lead generation.

The results? Pretty decent. To me, at least.

The people in charge weren’t happy again. I was the only one who understood the results were decent for the budget and effort we had put in and seeing that the platform itself wasn’t converting.

Sign number four.

I started feeling dejected, questioning my every move.

I often wondered if I was a good marketer. While I was getting flak in the office for not delivering numbers, outside my freelance clients were begging me to take on more work so I could help them. I was clearly conflicted.

So I waved the white flag and resigned.

The project is still live but is no longer taken care of.

After I left, they decided not to do any marketing, focusing on onsite SEO only. About a year later, the tech team left and nobody works on the platform anymore.

Lessons learned

Set expectations

One of the most important things that wasn’t communicated was expectations. The directors didn’t say what they wanted out of the project — no subscriber goals, no KPIs, no monetary goals. They just wanted proof of concept, which they did get once subscribers started rolling in, but nobody took that and ran with it.

The entire team starting dragging their feet to work because it constantly felt like nothing they were doing would please the people sitting on top.

Value your resources

While we were hustling so hard to get proof of concept from the outside world, nobody pointed out that the internal team fit the user demographic of the platform. There was no communication about the website platform to them before I took over. Everyone was working in silos. When the entire company was involved, it was more for a generic update and if feedback was provided, it often fell on deaf ears. Those who were giving their opinions out of kindness soon stopped communicating their thoughts, too.

The problem to me was simple — the people on top never actually entrusted the project in the hands of the team. Marketing best practices were demeaned, technology was ridiculed — and everyone started feeling small after months of not being able to prove themselves because we were working in circles.

Micro-managing isn’t productive

Just typing this out is agitating me. After a few months of realising I had hit a dent with organic marketing, the managers and directors started asking me to send in weekly reports of the work I was doing. The list wasn’t that long, really. But what they failed to notice is that marketing isn’t just about uploading a social media post and then sitting and waiting for it to work. There’s more to do than that.

Instead, my time was spent in meetings to report progress, take down minutes, and then preparing weekly reports for someone to see (I’m still not sure who actually checked the reports). In the end, I felt increasingly gutted looking at the list of work every week and not being able to provide tangible results from it — it was driving me crazy.

Data is collected for a reason

Use it! I always request my freelance clients to provide me with some data to show that the writing or marketing I do for them is working. Even the slightest increase in traffic is a number we can work with.

But in this project, we weren’t communicating the numbers regularly. Plus, what mattered to me, didn’t matter to another person, and vice versa. Analytics was not given due importance — and this is coming from someone who dislikes numbers and wishes she could just write without worrying about data. The reality is, even basic data would’ve been helpful. Knowing when to follow up with subscribers, or what add-value they were looking for would’ve been helpful. But we didn’t know if any of these efforts were working because analytics was hardly a topic to be discussed in meetings.

Whatever I’ve written above can be easily read as a rant. I was not happy with the project, I felt small, I felt dejected, and I felt not good enough.

Keeping all my emotions about the project aside, could I have done better? Yes.

Could I have taken responsibility and say “look, guys, I know my stuff, I got this!”? Yep!

So why didn’t I do it?

Because nobody was listening. And because I wasn’t confident enough that my work was well, working, because I just didn’t know!

We didn’t communicate how we really felt, and what anyone really wanted out of the project. The team had only three people and we were all working in silos. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one frustrated. I was just the first to own up to that feeling and walk away.

Which is also another point to drive, isn’t it? When we don’t feel right about something, why don’t we say it?

Why are we afraid that our CEO, boss, chief, what-have-you, will fire us? I had come to the point that I let all my grievances out to my boss. He knew what was going on in my mind. And yet, I constantly felt like I was the only one taking the effort to make a change.

And I bet you, the other team members felt the same way individually.

Yet, again, nobody communicated this.

It’s not with just this project either. I’ve worked on many remote projects since I quit and started my business. The lack of communication doesn’t ascertain that the efforts I’m putting in are working for them.

I ask or request access to their analytics but I’m ghosted. So I just keep rehashing best practices and cross my fingers (and toes!) that it works for them.

In the end, I tire myself out with the guessing game and end up closing the project and moving on. It’s not a nice feeling, this, but it has to be done.

So before you want to embark on that next marketing project, sit your team down and establish your expectations. This is especially important if you work in a big team, but equally vital if you’re a solopreneur outsourcing marketing efforts to a virtual assistant.

Decide what’s the best way to communicate.

Don’t work in silos, but recognise that some of your partners or team members may be quieter or introverted — less vocal. Find ways to get them to express their opinions and ideas.

And most importantly, communicate what’s happening with analytics, results, and tweak your goals if you need to. With everyone aligned to the same goal, and with the will to learn, adapt and grow, plus a dash of patience and perseverance, your marketing effort will succeed.