La capsula Informativa: Launching TikTok for The Salvation Army Southeastern Michigan Thrift Stores

Leveraging our expertise in short-form video content from creating the ARC’s Instagram Reels, we developed a scalable process and strategy specific to TikTok. This strategy was designed to ensure user engagement through what we know is most important and unique to the TikTok platform: authenticity, timeliness and fun.

While the process for Instagram Reels creation involved quarterly content shoots, Franco implemented separate, bi-weekly shoots at southeast Michigan thrift store locations for TikTok, allowing our team to consistently capture fresh, trend-inspired content for the platform. Bi-weekly brainstorm sessions were also established to align with shoot schedules, enabling our team to identify relevant trends.

To begin, we shared repurposed Instagram Reels to populate the account and maximize existing content, creating a good mixture of informative and eventually trendy organic content in line with TikTok culture.

TikTok content takes on many different formats, including traditional videos, CapCut edits and carousels. Through daily social monitoring, our team also embraces user-generated content by resharing and interacting with posts shared by local users, fostering a sense of community and trust. This also allows our team to identify and build a list of influencers for potential collaborations, as we know influencer content is among the most engaging on the platform.

Since launching on this platform, we’ve steadily increased our audience month-over-month, garnering 125 followers by the end of 2024. While followers continue to rise, the ARC’s content is consistently reaching a relevant audience and starting conversations about the thrift stores.

About 66% of all account traffic came from the For You Page, validating the use of relevant hashtags and trending sounds to reach an expanded audience to support sustainable growth and engagement.

The content we created generated:

44.2K Views

2.91K Engagements

6.95% Engagement Rate (exceeding platform average)

157 Shares

Through our monthly social reports, metrics reveal the power of trending sounds, seasonal themes and a balanced mix of entertaining and informative content.

Each of the videos below reinforce ARC’s potential to connect with a younger audience and build a thrifting community while driving awareness of the ARC’s mission on the TikTok platform.