TikTok is the New Google
TikTok may seem like just a dancing app for teens and tweens, but in reality, it’s a great platform for business and law firms to easily grow their social presence and flex their expertise in a fun and relaxed environment. So, yes, TikTok for Lawyers is a thing.
TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform on the market today. In fact, according to Cloudflare TikTok dethroned Google as the most popular website in the U.S. in February, March, June, and through this August.
Many lawyers compete and pay thousands of dollars every month to sit at the top of Google for their law practice, yet Google itself is seeing its traffic and visibility waning. This is a great opportunity for those lawyers who are willing to learn how to use TikTok to get ahead of the SEO curve and build their audience without paying the big Google ad bucks.
That’s why we built this guide to be the ultimate TikTok for lawyers guide. Let’s jump into how the platform works and how you can leverage it.
How TikTok Works
TikTok is a short-form video-sharing social media platform. Similar to other social media platforms like Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels, TikTok focuses on short-form video consumption. Popularized by GenZ and its viral TikTok dances and trending sounds, TikTok has proven that short-form video can be a great way to attract an audience.
Because TikTok is a video-sharing platform, creators are encouraged to create short videos ranging in length from 20 seconds to 10 minutes aimed at educational content, entertaining audiences, and inspiring followers. TikTok encourages vertical video content and creators to create videos regularly and consistently. With the average creator creating and distributing daily videos.
The TikTok algorithm is known for helping small creators develop huge followings quickly and is known to continually distribute videos to new audiences making video content searchable, discoverable, and a much more rewarding experience for social media creators. Ask any TikTokker, and they’ll tell you how powerful and precise the algorithm is.
The TikTok Algorithm Explained
The TikTok algorithm is unique in that it allows video content to be discovered by new audiences quickly. But how does it work?
The TikTok algorithm pushes out video content to users’ individual For You Page (a section of curated content within the app) based on users’ interactions with other videos and subject matter. If the video content in the For You Page performs well, TikTok pushes out the video content to additional audiences.
TikTok’s algorithm decides if a video is worth promoting and pushes out to additional For You Pages based on the number of likes, the quantity of comments, amount of shares, and overall watch time of the video.
The greater the percentage of watch time in conjunction with the engagement for the video will determine whether TikTok’s algorithm continues to promote the content.
Each of these metrics is extremely important to ensure your videos get the maximum visibility and viewership and wind up on the For Your Page of the creator’s target audience.
TikTok Lawyers to Learn From
There are several law firms on TikTok and lawyers on TikTok who are really showing up and demonstrating how social media platforms can massively grow your law firm without paying for ads. They are proving TikTok for lawyers can be a successful marketing strategy.
We’ve made a list of our favorite lawyers on TikTok here.
How to Film TikTok Video Content for the Legal Industry
Before you film your first TikTok videos, we highly encourage you to know the basics and best practices around filming your first set of videos.
How to Setup Your Law Firm TikTok Account
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Create a TikTok account
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Add your name. Note: This is searchable.
- Choose a username.
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Follow other creators on TikTok to get inspired.
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Comment on other creators’ posts and start engaging with them.
How to Film Your First TikTok Video
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Choose a topic.
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Select a compelling hook.
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Identify the style of your video.
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Decide if you’re going to use a trending sound.
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Film in front of good lighting.
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Film in short snippets.
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Bring all your snippets together into TikTok.
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Trim your clips to be hyper short and to ensure each clip follows the next.
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Add text on-screen relevant to your topic.
TikTok Videos Best Practices
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Video content should be filmed in vertical format
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Keep your first batch of videos short – less than 1-minute
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Practice delivering a compelling hook to your target audience
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Use good lighting and a tripod to keep your camera steady
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Rehearse your delivery and get comfortable with filming in small snippets
TikTok Legal Content that Gets Views & Followers
Because TikTok is so heavily focused on a compelling content strategy, having a good idea of the type of video content that performs well on the platform is helpful.
When you’re first starting out on TikTok, we recommend starting with succinct informative legal videos. Lawyers have access to a plethora of legal issues and questions that their clients bring to them daily.
Use your past conversations with your clients daily to inspire your first sets of topics for your video content. For example, we’ve seen successful law firm TikTok accounts answer high-level basic questions around the law and even clear up misunderstandings at a high level with video content focused on the difference between various legal issues or legal topics or even combatting common legal misconceptions.
Several intelligent trademark attorneys who do it well build content around the difference between an LLC, S-Corp, and a Trademark. They point at the screen and add text to explain how each differs from the other and what protections each provides. This type of content is genius and clears up a commonly misunderstood topic in an easy, simple, and relevant way, and requires little to no videography or editing skills.
But if informational videos seem boring to you, you may want to opt to lean into TikTok culture and try a TikTok dance or create funny videos taking aim at the nature of the law and what you do as a lawyer. This is likely to perform well, too, since it’s generally entertaining but also fun to watch.
Before we discuss captions more, let’s differentiate between the TikTok caption and subtitles on videos. Both are important, but when we reference the TikTok caption, we mean the social media blurb displayed with your video. When we talk about subtitles, we mean the actual words displayed on the video screen that tracks your audio and/or spoken content.
On TikTok quality content is key. You want to consistently build compelling video content that promotes engagement and drives users to follow you for more. That’s why we recommend you script your content until you get the hang of creating content that really resonates.
How to Write Your TikTok Script
There are a few key elements to a great TikTok script. These include:
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A compelling hook
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A quick intro of yourself and what you do.
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Your content
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Your call-to-action
Your TikTok script will ideally be short and sweet. It’s important to remember that delivering your content quickly and concisely is so crucial on TikTok because watch time is a key metric for your account’s growth. We’ve put together some tips when thinking about hooks, intros, and call-to-actions to help you achieve success.
To get an idea of what’s working in your industry, look to other lawyers who have had success on TikTok. Take note of the hooks, intros, and calls-to-action they use to prompt their audience to take action. It’s really easy to spot the ones that work well.
How to Write Your TikTok Caption
The social media caption you write on TikTok should reflect the content of your video. The best captions on TikTok incorporate the keywords you want to rank for within TikTok’s algorithm and search.
TikTok captions should be short and to the point. TikTok limits your character limit to 300 characters. So, try to be concise but still include relevant keywords and search terms so your content is discoverable.
In addition to writing a great caption, you’ll want to perform hashtag research to ensure your content gets the maximum visibility possible.
When identifying hashtags, it’s important to perform a search on both the TikTok app and the TikTok desktop. We’ve noticed different videos and hashtags perform differently on each platform.
There are a few strategies that work well when performing hashtag research.
Most law firms and marketing departments will find it easiest to start their hashtag research process by looking at their existing target keywords.
For example, an oil and gas law firm will want to start by researching hashtags around oil and gas law and their location one locations of service.
You’ll want to note down the list of hashtags and their viewer count.
Example Hashtags
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#oilandgas – 381.9m views
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#oilandgaslawyer – 3,578 views
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#oilandgaslaw – 3,575 views
From here, you can start building a list of potential hashtags to use on your TikTok views based on the size of your target audience.
A Note on Hashtag Size:
A large TikTok audience would mean your account can leverage more robust and higher viewed hashtags. A smaller audience would mean your account should leverage smaller hashtags until you’ve built a following.
The second way to look up relevant hashtags that will boost your views is to find the top accounts within your practice area and click through their videos to determine what hashtags they use.
This stealth way of discovering potential hashtags is one we like to use a lot here at By Aries. Using this strategy, we can typically find hashtags outside the standard keywords we’d search and discover what types of hashtags get the most traction and visibility.
Example Hashtags
Informed with these new additional hashtags, we can now start to put together a list of potential hashtags to use on our video content that will attract those in our target audience. You must identify hashtags your potential clients would use in order to discover you.
Editing Your TikTok Videos
You’ll have several different options for editing your TikTok video content. You can edit your TikTok natively in the app if you’d like or you can export your video to a professional editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. In addition, there are plenty of iPhone native apps that allow you to edit your video content, including CapCut, Adobe Rush, and InShot.
Our personal tool of choice for editing our short-form video content is Descript.
One of the primary reasons we like to edit our video content within Descript is so we can add captions to our video content. So often, video content is often consumed with the sound off, so having captions on video content is key to ensuring it’s consumable even without sound. Plus, including captions is an inclusive practice that allows hearing-impaired persons to access your content.
How to Add Closed Captions to Your TikTok Video Content
Most of the apps we mentioned above allow you to easily add captions to your videos, but few allow you to do it as seamlessly and easy as Descript. Nevertheless, we wanted to break down a few of the apps we have used and continue to use to add captions.
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Descript – Descript is a paid desktop app that will allow you to add captions to your Tiktok videos and edit them like a Microsoft Word document. Yes, you read that correctly. Imagine editing your audio and video content like you would edit a Word document. This is the power of Descript. In addition to editing your videos easily, you can also add captions to your videos, sounds, and other fun elements, like transitions, emojis, and more.
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TikTok (free) – If you’re short on time and budget, then another great option for adding subtitles to your video content is the native captions option in the TikTok app. The only downside to this method of adding subtitles to your content is that we’ve found TikTok’s captions to be less reliable in terms of accurately transcribing the content in your video. So, keep in mind that you’ll likely have to do some editing.
Publishing Your TikTok Video
Once you’ve filmed, edited, and finalized your TikTok video caption, it’s time to actually upload your video TikTok. TikTok is intended to be used on a mobile device, so we recommend uploading all your content via the mobile app. You can publish content via desktop and some social media aggregator tools, but we’ve found the features are severely limited. So, we recommend just using your mobile app.
How to Publish a TikTok Video
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Upload your content directly into TikTok
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Add relevant on-screen text (again try to use your keywords here)
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Add a sound or music
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Add your TikTok caption and hashtags
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Choose a Cover design and frame
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Add a Cover caption
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Post your video
Once you’ve published your video, it will take a few minutes for your content to be reviewed by the algorithm before it goes live. Don’t worry if, at first, you have only a handful of views on your video content.
We often get asked how to measure performance on TikTok. Many lawyers mistakenly believe that if their first few videos don’t go viral, they can’t and won’t be able to make TikTok work for them. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Remember how we mentioned that TikTok’s algorithm pushes video content out to TikTok users based on the engagement the content receives and the watch time?
Given the importance of these two metrics, if you’re not seeing great performance on your TikTok channel it’s important to start by analyzing how those two metrics are performing.
How to Analyze Your TikTok Data
To get accurate metrics on your TikTok account, you’ll want to switch your account from a personal account to a business account. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have access to even more analytics data to help you discern if you’re on the right track with your content.
But how do you find the data? Simply click on the “More Data” button on a video to reveal your video’s analytics via the Video Analysis dashboard.
Your Video Analysis dashboard will tell you how many views your video has received and the number of hearts, comments, saves and shares your video has received. In addition, this dashboard will show you the Total Play Time, Average Watch Time, percentage of people who have watched the full video, and how large your audience reach is.
This data can be extremely helpful in helping you analyze what worked and what didn’t with your video content.
The higher the watch percentage, the more likely TikTok will push this video out, remember? So, creating videos that keep people’s attention from the start until the end and videos that make a quick point will be key to keeping your watch time high, right?
Content strategy is integral to TikTok success, so understanding what content is performing well is critical. Let this data help inform your content strategy as your build out additional TikTok content. And to that same end, lean into the content that is working, since clearly your audience enjoys it.
Next Steps: TikTok for Lawyers
Ready to post videos on TikTok? We hope you feel empowered to leverage TikTok in a new way now. Once you have a firm grasp of how TikTok works, you’ll find that your content overall across various popular social media platforms will improve. TikTok has the innate ability to teach you how to concisely deliver content in a way that educates, informs, and builds trust. There is so much power in that, don’t you think?
It’s important to remember that no matter what other platforms on which you choose to build a following on, it’s essential that you have a comprehensive marketing strategy built around helping you move your followers from TikTok to a consultation with you.
