Who Has the Most Followers on TikTok and How They Made It

Even though TikTok looked merely like a pastime at first, today, it holds the title of the fastest-growing social media platform of all time. It took only four years for this app to reach over 3 billion downloads, and the most recent data show it counts more than 1 billion active users.As the number of users and content creators keeps growing and new trends and features emerge all the time, becoming famous on TikTok is getting increasingly difficult. Still, some TikTokers cracked the code. They became mega-influencers and turned making content into high-paying careers. The person who has the most followers on TikTok gets millions of dollars per year now, and even those with a smaller following can get a pretty penny through paid posts and brand collabs, the TikTok Creator Fund, or both. Thanks to the great number of popular content creators with high engagement rates, TikTok is also an excellent marketing tool. More and more businesses are realizing its potential, using the app to promote their brands with minimum spending, either via their own content or collabs with successful TikTokers.

TikTok Accounts With the Most Followers

Source: Blue BirdTikTok content is short and to-the-point but catchy and absorbing as well. Viewers are easily hooked, but TikTokers with the most followers also know how to get the audience to come back for more. Here’s the list of the users with the most followers on TikTok at the beginning of 2022:

1. Charli D’Amelio—133.3 million
2. Khaby Lame—127.7 million
3. Bella Poarch—87.4 million
4. Addison Rae—86.2 million
5. Zach King—66.7 million

Who Are the Most Popular TikTokers, and What Are Their Stories?

While Charli D’Amelio dominates this top 5 list with her 133.3 million followers, she is far from being the only creator who boasts such a huge following. The success of the most followed TikTokers nowadays stretches far beyond social media, and many top creators got themselves lucrative deals with major brands who engaged them to build their own following on TikTok. Some of the names on the list even branched out into the music and movie industry, launched their own clothing brands, made appearances in commercials, and much more. While they owe some part of their success to being in the right place at the right time, the biggest TikTok celebrities also have a great understanding of what works well on this fast-paced platform.

Charli D’Amelio

Source:VidconCharli D’Amelio is a 17-year old dancer and the first TikTok creator to ever reach 100 million followers. It took her only seven months to achieve this, which makes it even more impressive. She first started on TikTok in 2019 and went viral the same year after participating in the popular Renegade TikTok dance challenge created by Jalaiah Harmon. Even though she’s still a teen, she has already exceeded the follower count of many celebrities and major businesses on TikTok. She collaborated with a number of renowned brands, such as Procter & Gamble, for whom she created a viral dance challenge called #DistanceDance. Her talent was also spotted by Bebe Rehxa, who invited her to be a backup dancer during her Jonas Brothers’ concert pre-show. Social media experts attribute her mind-blowing success to a combination of factors—the right posting time, posting consistency, engaging content which pushed her videos to the For You page, and a little bit of luck.

Khaby Lame

Source: tubefilterSenegalese-born Khabane Lame is a TikTok and Instagram influencer based in Italy, whose viral success resulted from posts in which he pokes fun at cringy life-hack videos. During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, Lame lost his job at a factory and went to spend some time at his parents’ home in search of a new job. Out of quarantine boredom, he downloaded TikTok and started experimenting with it in his bedroom, consistently posting videos under the nickname Khaby Lame, and gradually became famous for his humor and authenticity.Nowadays, he’s the most popular male TikToker who even made collabs with the likes of the supermodel Naomi Campbell and the famous environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

Bella Poarch

Source: theverg.comThe TikTok-influencer-turned-musician, Bella Poarch, is a 25-year old whose popularity exploded overnight thanks to her hypnotic lip-syncing videos. Even though she joined TikTok in April 2020, her account didn’t get too many impressions until August that year, when she posted a video of herself lip-syncing to Millie B’s song M to the B, which remains a TikTok video with the most likes ever (55 million). Nowadays, she’s breaking into the music industry with her successful singles and music videos featuring other social media stars, such as the gamer Valkyrae and YouTuber Larray. Poarch also collaborates with brands, earning around $30,000 for every sponsored TikTok.

Addison Rae Easterling

Source: tubefilterAddison Rae Easterling is a 22-year old professional dancer based in L.A. She holds third place among the most followed TikTok accounts but has the highest TikTok earnings, estimated at $5 million per year. Her videos of dancing with her mom, Sheri, attracted the TikTok audience, but she reached stardom thanks to the post of her lip-syncing to Love Me Like You Do by Kelsea Ballerini. After she posted another lip-syncing video—this time to Mariah Carey’s Obsessed—even Mariah Carey liked the video, which caused views and likes to soar. For Easterling, TikTok fame also opened the doors of the music industry—so far, she has released a few singles, including her 2021 hit Obsessed.

Zach King

Source: artofitZach King is a 31-year-old social media influencer, filmmaker, and illusionist based in L.A. His presence on TikTok is just one of the aspects of his social media success—he also has millions of followers on YouTube and Instagram. He first gained popularity on Vine, but when the platform shut down in 2016, his fame found fertile ground on TikTok due to the similarities between these two apps. His success comes from his entertaining charisma and cleverly edited videos with imperceptible transitions that make him look like a real magician. The best example of the popularity of his content is his magic broomstick TikTok, which holds the title of the most viewed TikTok video ever with 2.1 billion views.

How Can Your Brand Benefit From Partnering With Influencers?

Even though you can now post 3-minute videos, allowing for more complex marketing stunts, TikTok is still fast-paced, which is why young audiences love it. New generations of consumers also love and respond to influencer marketing, which makes TikTok an excellent platform for brand promotion. Partnering with influencers for advertising purposes—particularly those whose niche matches yours—is a superb opportunity to expand your brand’s reach and approach millions of potential customers.You don't need to collaborate with the most popular influencers only—TikTok is a great platform for mid-tier or even micro-influencers as they often have better engagement rates. Here’s what influencer marketing can do for your business:

• Increase brand awareness and sales—Millennials and Gen Z audiences are more open to information about brands they’ve acquired on social media, which can lead to increased conversions
• Build credibility—Influencers’ followers trust their recommendations. By engaging an influencer, your advertising campaign won’t feel too salesy
• Enrich your content strategy—If you’re out of ideas for your next post, influencer marketing can also come in handy by filling the gap in your posting schedule
• Establish long-term partnerships—Positive relationships that come from influencer marketing can result in multiple shares and reposts even after the collaboration has finished

Succeeding on TikTok for Brands Is Easier With the Help of Professionals

TikTok users might dream of just jumping in front of a smartphone camera while dancing to catchy tunes and attracting millions of followers (and dollars!), but brands have to take a more serious approach to achieve success on TikTok.TikTok videos are the final product of a long process that requires an in-depth understanding of the TikTok algorithm and trends, superb analytical skills and the ability to interpret profile metrics, diverse experience in creating social media strategies, clever approach to paid advertising, and much more.This is why relying on small in-house teams with limited experience and resources to conduct a TikTok marketing campaign usually turns out unproductive. Expanding your brand awareness and growing your social media following requires the engagement of social media experts and content creators specialized in different fields, such as photography, videography, web design, and others. Without an all-encompassing team of a professional social media agency, you risk wasting resources on a campaign that’s wont yield the desired results.

How We Make Stellar Social Media Strategies

Kubbco is a social media agency that understands that digital marketing requires an individual approach. The social media landscape is an ever-changing field, and our job is to make reliable forecasts on what approach would work for your brand short- and long-term. Once a client approaches Kubbco, we make sure we thoroughly understand their brand’s message before we set our course of action. We come up with multiple ideas for viral content and test them before launching a campaign to ensure your resources aren’t wasted.Our broad experience with social media and clients from diverse industries helps us make sense of when and how to use paid media to attract the attention of your target audience. Here’s what we offer to our clients:

1. Analyzing your accounts to get an insight into your past activity and target audience and come up with a strategy that will drive engagement and promote your brand’s message
2. Managing your socials with the special focus on growing your following and interacting with your followers
3. Creating all types of content custom-made for your brand’s identity—photos, videos, written content, podcasts, microsites, and much more
4. Promoting your brand via paid campaigns, such as collaboration with influencers and pay-per-click advertisements, to get your brand even more exposure

Kubbco’s Success Stories—OLAPLEX, essence cosmetics, Matas, and Many More

A renowned hair care brand OLAPLEX turned to Kubbco in 2021, asking for assistance with their TikTok marketing campaigns. As a result of our cooperation, they’ve seen a dizzying improvement in how their TikTok content performs in merely five weeks. Our campaign resulted in:Total Views5.1 millionTotal Interactions224,000New Followers22,000Number of Videos28Videos With Over 100,000 Views6Viral Videos (Over 1 Million Views)2Our experience with essence cosmetics is yet another example of how Kubbco experts effectively tackle the challenges of TikTok marketing—in two years and two months of our cooperation, their TikTok account amassed 86,000 new followers and 73 million views overall.Need us to do the same for your brand? Contact our team of social media professionals. If you'd like to learn more about what it takes to promote your business on TikTok more successfully, sign up for our newsletter and never miss out on the latest news and actionable advice that will improve your overall social media performance.Featured image: NFL