Your Loyalty Members Are Talking on TikTok. Are You Even in the Room?
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Written by Max Savransky, Global Director of Loyalty Strategy at TrueLoyal.
Here’s a scenario worth contemplating. A loyalty member loves your brand. They film a video about it, tag you in the caption, post it to their TikTok feed, and their followers watch it. Trust is built. Purchase intent goes up. And your brand? Completely unaware it happened.
That’s not a hypothetical. For most loyalty programs right now, it’s exactly what’s happening.
TikTok Isn’t a Social Platform - It’s a Search Engine
TikTok has rapidly become one of the most powerful consumer discovery engines on the planet. According to The Wise Marketer, 74% of Gen Z use TikTok for information, and 51% prefer it over Google for certain types of searches. That’s not a social media stat, it’s a search behaviour stat, and it should get the attention of anyone managing a loyalty program.
What makes this more interesting is what happened to brand investment on TikTok in 2025. Paid ad campaigns dropped nearly 50%, while UGC collaborations more than doubled (Collabstr, 2026 Influencer Marketing Report, based on platform data). Brands didn’t walk away from TikTok. They figured out that real customer content converts better than anything
they could produce themselves.
TikTok UGC already outperforms brand-created video on trust, engagement, and purchase decisions (Nielsen, 2023 Trust in Advertising Study), and with social commerce on track to surpass $100 billion in U.S. sales, TikTok is the fastest-growing channel in that mix (eMarketer, 2025 Social Commerce Forecast).
TikTok rewards authenticity and always has. The brands catching up are the ones finally acting on it.
What Loyalty Programs Keep Missing
Brands managing loyalty programs are increasingly recognising authentic consumer advocacy on TikTok as valuable, yet most have no systematic way to find it. A loyalty member who posts about your brand isn’t just creating content: they’re signalling depth of relationship. That signal is currently invisible to most programs.
The brands getting this right are already connecting the dots. Sephora and Starbucks reward customers with loyalty points for submitting UGC, tying advocacy directly into the program mechanic. The hard part has always been the discovery, knowing when a member mentioned you in the first place.
This is where consumer trust becomes a commercial argument. Accenture’s Life Trends 2024 report found that only 37% of people globally believe brands have their best interests at heart. In that climate, a real customer talking genuinely about your brand on TikTok carries more weight than any campaign asset your studio produces. The authenticity gap between UGC and brand content has never been wider, and brands that can systematically find and act on that content have a real advantage.
So, What Does TikTok for Business Actually Change?
Loyalty teams know their most valuable members are out there advocating for them. The problem has never been willingness to act on that intel, but rather, it's been visibility.
TikTok for Business closes that gap. When a member tags your brand in a caption or description, that post surfaces automatically in your content board.
No manual searching, no guesswork. You see it, you decide what to do with it: engage with the creator, filter by TikTok mentions, flag content internally, or request usage rights directly. The advocacy that was previously invisible becomes something you can actually build on.
For loyalty programs specifically, this is the missing link between “our members love us” and actually being able to prove it, use it, and build on it.
Summary
TikTok UGC isn’t a content trend. It’s a loyalty signal that most programs are currently ignoring by default rather than by design. The members already talking about your brand on TikTok are doing the hardest part of advocacy for free. TikTok for Business means you finally get to engage with them.
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Max Savransky is the Global Director of Loyalty Strategy at TrueLoyal. Max is a customer strategy, loyalty and data leader, with a proven 17-year track record of designing, validating and deploying successful client strategies to drive engagement, retention and revenue growth. Max is also one of the co-authors of ‘Loyalty Programs: The Complete Guide’ (editions 1 and 2), the definitive book on loyalty for industry professionals.
Connect with me on LinkedIn!
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The loyalty programs already using TikTok for Business aren’t just keeping up, they’re building a genuine advocacy layer that most programs don’t have. We think it’s a conversation worth having.
References: Collabstr 2026 Influencer Marketing Report (platform data); The Wise Marketer; Nielsen 2023 Trust in Advertising Study; eMarketer 2025 Social Commerce Forecast; Accenture Life Trends 2024.
