The goal and purpose of Microsoft EDU TikTok remains to engage and continue fostering a fast-growing audience of teachers who are active on the platform. We strive to win over the hearts of the education community by inserting ourselves into the expanding TikTok platform, leading with authenticity and value. We bring our mission statement to life, "Empowering every student and educator to achieve more." Many teachers have embraced TikTok as their platform of choice, sharing their passion for education, and in doing so have become influencers in their own right.
Teachers and students aren’t on TikTok to talk to brands. Our research informed many key insights, the most important being that they are on TikTok to talk to one another. Our opportunity and our strategy as a brand was to give them a place to do so.
When we initially launched our channel, our platform wasT2T (teacher to teacher), with our positioning as the 'The Teacher's Lounge,' meaning that our TikTok would be for teachers, by teachers. Over time, our focus has shifted to become a TikTok channel that celebrates education for everyone, instead of just educators and current students.
Content Pillars:
Our content pillars are called 3E's and F: Enlighten, Encourage, Entertain, and Feelz. All of our content is encompassed in one of these pillars, so that our work informs our audience about our offering, cheers them on, provides a relatable laugh, and gives them a heartwarming moment.
Content Streams:
Focusing on content from teachers themselves helped us bring Microsoft's commitment to diversity and inclusion to life.
We make content in-house using a mix of talented people and source user generated content on an ongoing basis to bring our audience to our channel. We also highlight creators from all walks of education through our internal influencer arm, ION. By combining all of these various content streams, we have brought Microsoft's commitment to diversity and inclusion to life.
2022 Metrics include:
· 1.4 M followers
· 194.4 M views
· 28.1K comments
· 72K shares
· 5.8M likes
· 9.5% ER* (compared to 3-9% brand average)
Within the first year of launching our channel, we leaned into exciting teacher related cultural moments. With Teacher Appreciation Week in May and our positioning of The Teachers’ Lounge, we wanted to align with this moment to create a splash! Instead of leaning into content by teachers, for teachers, we saw this is an opportunity to lean into content by students (past and present), for teachers. During this week, our profile views increased by 98%, we increased video views to 10M+ compared to the benchmark of 1-3M per week, generated 300k+ engagements and created our own custom sound for the first time that was used 34 times.
Another exciting venture we took on this year was developing our own commenting strategy to connect with teachers, educators, and students across the platform and we found a gold mine of joy, engagement, and community. We commented on over 3,500+ TikTok’s with our top comment reaching over 75K likes and receiving 384 replies.
As one of the first Microsoft brands on TikTok, we helped create the blueprint internally at Microsoft and quickly rose to one of the top three most engaged and followed accounts in the Microsoft ecosystem.
