It took Bryson Oppermann, owner of online T-shirt merchant GotFunny.com, a few months of trial and error until he found a winning recipe for the brand’s TikTok posts. But now that he has, Opperman attributes 95% of GotFunny’s sales to shoppers learning about its brand on social media, primarily TikTok and Instagram.

His first TikTok posts didn’t receive many views, he says.

“I was in a sense trying a little too hard. It felt very manufactured,” Oppermann says. “I was purposely trying to create content that would go viral, and create content for the algorithm rather than for actual people.”

Creating authentic videos for TikTok

Once Oppermann created videos that were more authentic to himself and his brand, he grew his audience to 105,000 followers on TikTok and his videos gained millions of views.

He gives an example of one video that took him three hours to create, which included the at-the-moment trending song, sounds and hashtags, and received 300 views. This is compared with a video that took 10 seconds to shoot of him saying, “I think this is the best shirt I ever created,” and then a shot of the T-shirt, which received 500,000 views. His takeaway was to create content that is “genuinely him,” and the content will resonate with his audience.

“I don’t need to copy what other people are doing, I know how to go viral (in a way) that’s true to myself, my business and my brand,” Oppermann says.

Online sales increase anywhere from 200% to 2,000% for products that GotFunny features in TikTok posts that receive 500,000 views or more, Opperman says.

@brys.onlinePersonally, I still think it’s the Silly Goose University one but i get the hype 🙌♬ Bejeweled – Taylor Swift

These videos are all organic posts, with no ad dollars behind them. Even though they are promoting products on his site, the goal is to not have them feel like an ad, he says.

TikTok works for young shoppers

He also started only posting once per day, instead of two or three times a day, like he did at the start. This way, he’s not just rushing to put something together just to have it, and he allows each post time to gain traction and live on its own.

“I wasn’t giving the other content time to breathe,” he says.

This new strategy has been easier for Oppermann. He can create content that he finds funny. At 26, Oppermann fits the target demographic for his product. 56% of GotFunny’s TikTok audience are consumers ages 15-24 and 37% are 25-34, for a total of 93% of the audience that is younger than 35 years old.

Social media influences those young shoppers. More than half of shoppers 18-39 say social media influences their online purchasing, according to a Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights survey of 1,070 online shoppers in April 2023.

Instagram compared with TikTok

But not all platforms are created equally for each brand. Oppermann posts his TikTok videos as Reels on Instagram, but he posts separate images to his Instagram page that are more selling-focused than what he would post on TikTok.

Instagram posts have to be more “aesthetically pleasing,” he says, and have high production value. The TikTok audience and platform is better for more behind-the-scene and casual videos, which are more on-brand for GotFunny, he says.

This difference in audience taste could be why GotFunny has far fewer followers on Instagram, at 45,500, than on TikTok. The age range, however, is similar on both platforms, in which 85% of GotFunny’s Instagram followers are younger than 35.

“Instagram compared to TikTok has a lot of features and ways to build a business account that people will still follow and engage with and not feel advertised to or feel out of place with it,” Oppermann says. “Whereas TikTok is different. It seems to be oriented to the individual or people who are on there to entertain themselves or laugh. They don’t want to be sold on stuff.”

This article is an excerpt from the free, members-only article Why Wacky ads work on TikTok while sober is better for Facebook. Read the article here and more in-depth articles related to digital marketing here.