How to find the right sound for your TikTok

Done well, great video content can harness the TikTok algorithm to get your brand posts seen by a new audience of TikTokers. This can be an excellent way to bring new traffic to your website and ultimately make sales.

However, it’s important to take some time to get to grips with a new platform before you start advertising your brand so you can be sure you’re producing the effects you’re looking for. In TikTok’s case, part of that learning curve involves understanding which music and sounds you can and can’t use within your content.

Can businesses use TikTok sounds?

When you make videos on TikTok to support your brand, you have the opportunity to include jingles, sound effects and music to enhance the final creation. This is something that is open to business and creator accounts, but because social media for business is a type of advertising, the rules are a little different for brands.

Due to copyrighting laws, not every song or sound is available to be used for commercial purposes. That applies to any post made by a business account, regardless of whether it is actively advertising a deliverable or not. If you were to accidentally use a piece of music within a post that is not commercially available, then the music would be removed from the post, which could have a big impact on the overall quality of the piece as well as how audiences engage with it.

Of course, content solely created by your team can be used. So, if you have the facilities and resources within your company to create music and sounds for social media posts, you can do that. But if you’d rather not use your time for that or you don’t have the resources to do so, does that mean your videos have to go without background music?

No! There are many sounds and songs that have been produced specifically for use by brands in commercial content, and these are fine to use on TikTok. You can find these pieces in TikTok’s Commercial Music Library.

What is TikTok’s Commercial Music Library?

The Commercial Music Library (CML) is designed to make your business advertising decisions easier. It’s a library of sounds and music that are approved for commercial use by business accounts on TikTok, allowing you to browse for the sound you want without having to worry about accidentally choosing something that isn’t licensed for business use.

Within the CML, you can browse manually or use filters to narrow down your search. You can even find sounds based on how other people are using them – sounds that have been used a lot are classed as viral sounds and can give you great insight into what is popular at the moment.

Even better, uploading TikToks via the app using a business account means that you will be automatically shown CML songs when you come to the audio stage. This makes it even easier for you to avoid accidentally choosing a song that’s not approved for commercial use, helping to make your content production process that much smoother.

How to pick the best TikTok sound for your video

Choosing a sound on TikTok isn’t quite as simple as it is when you do so for other social media platforms. All the usual considerations apply – such as whether the theme of the song fits with the topic of the content – but there are also other things to think about.

On TikTok, sounds have a functionality somewhat similar to hashtags on other platforms. When you browse the site, you can click on a hashtag to see other posts which use that hashtag. Similarly, you can watch a video which uses a certain sound, and click through to see other videos that feature that sound.

This is important because, like hashtags, sounds can trend and go viral. Choosing a sound that has gone viral can make it more likely that your content will be seen by a larger audience – and if you use the sound in a way that is fun and engaging, your content may even be more memorable to that audience.

You can find such sounds within the Creative Centre, which gives you statistics and other data relating to the popularity of each sound – for example, how many people have used it in their posts. Alternatively, you can simply search for ‘viral sounds’ to see what is currently popular.

However, both of these avenues can be a little broad and might give you a lot of options to choose from. If you want to narrow down your search to find sounds that could be useful for your brand, you could also try looking at what your competitors are doing. While you don’t want to carbon copy their TikToks, exploring the techniques of your competitors can help you to understand what might work for your own brand, without having to risk it yourself first. It’s a great way to kickstart your TikTok marketing campaign.