Can I Crack the TikTok Algorithm?
Historical Context — How I got here
Organic growth on TikTok is crazy right now. I started posting content in the latter half of January with absolutely no intention of growing a following. My entire focus up to this point has been all about growing my Twitter audience. One day, as I was 3D printing something out, I decided I would make an Instagram story as I’m known to do from time to time. But something happened in my mind as I was pulling out my phone. Instead of opening up the Instagram App, I accidentally opened up the TikTok app. Now, I had created TikToks before. In fact, I had created about a dozen or so motivational videos but they didn’t do very well. In fact, most of them hardly ever even got over 10 views. With a crushed soul, I stopped making videos for a while.
Alright, back to the happy accident. I open the TikTok app and just hit record. I basically did what I would have done had I been creating an IG story. The video wasn’t the best, but it got me recording and publishing content on TikTok again. The video didn’t do well, as expected, and even to this day, it has less than 20 views. But something happened when I uploaded that video. Something that was different this time. I had watched a TikTok by Gary Vee talking about the content people were posting on TikTok. In that video, he urged people to document and share their story. That everyone loves a good story and that if you wanted to do well on the platform, you needed to share your story as well. So, the next day, I took a slightly different approach. Instead of just rambling on a video, I built a story. I walked my audience through what a typical Saturday morning looks like for an Entrepreneur trying to build out a business. I decided to go with this, because that’s the type of content that I would be interested in watching. I’m interested in seeing how other grow and scale a business from nothing, so I figured I’d share my story and journey on growing my own business from nothing.
A dozen or so views later, my expectations were met. After all, this was the normal number of views I would typically get and was right in line with the previous day’s count. But as the day progressed, I got up to the 50’s. Then right before bed, 80 views! Wow, this was incredible, this was literally an 8X improvement over all my other videos. I couldn’t believe it, Gary was right! I woke up the next day to finding myself with nearly 150 views. This was amazing. I had a video that was in triple digit views. After 24 hours, the views stopped coming in, but it was okay, because by then, I was on to my next video.
55 videos later, I grew my audience from 17 followers to 73 followers and went from sub 100 likes on my videos to 759 likes! So, here I am at the beginning of month 2 of my TikTok journey, trying to figure out how I’m going to grow exponentially on this platform. I’ve done some research and I’m going to make some pivots this month to try new things. I’m bringing you along for the ride in case you too are trying to grow your TikTok following organically.
The Research
In all my research, I’m seeing that consistency is the key to growth on pretty much any platform. After months of trying to grow on other platforms, let me tell you that consistency is something you really need to commit to. Posting consistently, is challenging. Well, let me rephrase. Posting consistently is easy. Anyone can pick up their camera and record a wall for 15 seconds and slap a sound on it. But, posting something valuable consistently, is 100X harder to achieve. It takes a tremendous amount of energy, drive, and motivation to consistently post something that you think others will find valuable. There are often days, where I’m fighting with myself internally because I don’t believe in myself or the value that my content is bringing people.
So, here’s the plan. Some research showed that posting 4–6 pieces of content throughout the day is good. Additionally, it was discovered that using or not using hashtags has minimal effect. In my experience, I’ve seen that using specific trendy hash tags works 10% better on similar videos. And finally, the last two pieces are all about creating short videos with popular sounds. In my experience, I have seen both of these work very effectively. I’ve had two videos that were under 15 seconds with extremely popular sounds do extremely well. One did almost 8k views and the other did almost 2k views. 90% of my posts brought in between 140–160 views on average and these videos either were almost the full 60 seconds or didn’t include any popular sounds.
The Plan to Crack the Code
So, what am I going to be doing differently this time around? The first thing I’m going to focus on is consistency. I find it a lot harder to creatively create videos that are short with the right popular sound. I believe that if I focus on consistency, I will witness greater growth. What does this mean exactly? It’s simple, for the next 31 days, I’m going to post only 31 videos. 1 video every day. These videos are going to be standalone videos, as in they will not depend on the previous or future videos to make sense. Each of these videos is going to be on a cyber security awareness video. The time will be between 40–60 seconds as I have to “teach” someone something of value and it’s hard to do quickly. I’ll be experimenting with how I deliver the message and the sounds I use, but overall, 31 cyber security related videos coming to a For You page near you!
I’m hoping that by posting consistently, I’ll see better results when compared to posting more videos but inconsistently. I want to see what the algorithm favors based on my personal research and not that of other people. I mainly want to answer, if I post 31 high quality pieces of content each and every day, is it better than posting 55 pieces sporadically throughout the month. The beauty is that I can create content when I’m inspired and save the videos to my drafts. I can also schedule the distribution of the videos now that TikTok has opened up this feature to creators. Once the month is over, I’ll analyze my data and then develop my next theory and set out to prove that one. My goal is to be at 10,000 followers on TikTok by 4th of July. I’ll be posting my progress on Twitter, so make sure you follow me there if you are interested in finding out how things are going. If you want to become part of my story, make sure you follow me on TikTok as well!
