The calendar pages are turning toward the second half of 2026, which means marketing executives are doing what they always do at this time of year: staring at spreadsheets and wondering whether their holiday promotional strategies need updating.

Social Media Today, the trade publication, has begun issuing a series of guides for brands seeking to establish themselves on major platforms, and its latest installment concerns TikTok — the short-form video application that remains, as of this writing, both enormously popular with younger consumers and perpetually uncertain about its regulatory future in the United States. (One imagines the strategic planning meetings have an interesting quality.)

The advice offered is sensible enough, in the way that advice about social media marketing tends to be sensible: monitor what is trending, study the advertisements that are performing well, consider partnerships with creators who understand the platform's idioms better than most brand managers do. TikTok itself provides tools for this reconnaissance, including what it calls its Trends dashboard and a Top Ads listing organized by region and industry sector.

"Overt marketing will be less successful," the publication notes, in what might serve as the unofficial motto of every platform that has ever attracted young users and then watched brands arrive with their usual enthusiasm.

The underlying strategic framework — research, formulate, measure, adjust — would be recognizable to anyone who has worked on Madison Avenue since the days when "social media" meant the office Christmas party. What changes is merely the venue and the vocabulary.

Whether TikTok will still be the venue that matters when the holiday lights go up is, of course, a question that the publication's guide does not attempt to answer. Some things remain beyond the reach of even the most comprehensive trend-tracking dashboard.

Original story published in Social Media Today | A business community for the web's best thinkers on Social Media: "5 tips for building an effective brand presence on TikTok"