TikTok Famous: Complete Guide To TikTok Growth

A Brief History:

• TikTok previously known as Musical.ly which was founded in 2014.

• Musical.ly bought by ByteDance in 2017, renamed to Douyin in China & TikTok for rest of world.

• Bytedance worth an estimated $78 billion

Now is Your Time to Grow:

• TikTok is content deficient so content consumption is far higher than creation.

• Algorithm gives every video an opportunity for virality.

• 60% users are aged 16-24, platform will gain more prominence as audience ages up.

Huge Potential of TikTok:

• 738 million downloads in 154 countries in 2019.

• 1.5 billion downloads and reported over 800 million monthly active users.

• 90% of users use app multiple times a day.

• Adoption by many A list celebrities in recent times.

• Made number one hits including Lis Nas X’s Old Town Road Lizzo’s Truth Hurts.

• Likely heavy prominence of ecommerce and other advanced features in near future.

Professional Account:

• Needed to see advanced stats like watch time, amount of views, likes, comments and follower demographics.

Find Your Niche:

• Important to build a long term engaged audience.

• Niche ideas include dancing, humour, sea life, travelling, cooking etc.

• Identify your passion/interest/skills and identify the problems you can solve.

• Popular videos often include a skill, comedy and/or weirdness.

• Analyse videos on platform to identify opportunities & niches.

• Consistency is key on topic and posting frequency.

VASH Framework

Structure video to maximise watch time with VASH:

• Value - Increase trust and reciprocation.

• Awe - something users haven’t seen before.

• Surprise - Keep users engaged and increase view duration.

• Humour - make them laugh and get them to visit your profile.

AVR Formula:

• Attention - people stop, pay attention and engage with it.

• Value - needs to offer value to audience, encourages reciprocation with follow etc.

• Relevance - content needs to be relatable, matches with people of similar interest.

• Continually test and iterate content to find success.

Lighting:

• Good lighting is very important to encourage watch time and engagement.

• Can be achieved from natural light or lighting equipment such as a ring light.

• Poor lighting detracts from video and discourages viewership.

• Essential to ensure video isn’t pixelated.

• Background of video should be clean and camera not crooked.

Location:

• Location tells part of the story and pulls the audience in.

• Be aware of your background, the audience will notice this.

• Think of it like you are on stage, you must present yourself well.

• Social interactions in videos make them more unique and interesting.

Video Length:

• 10-15 second videos are most common.

• Longer form videos are harder to keep people engaged.

• Highly engaged long form videos have high chance of going viral.

Editing:

• Options of recording straight onto TikTok or off the platform.

• Depends on preferences, time and goals for TikTok.

• Off platform is likely more cinematic and better quality but takes longer.

• On platform is more down to earth and much faster to produce.

• Phone editing tools include iMovie, BeeCut & Videoshop.

• More advanced editing tools include Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Content Creation:

• Users have short attention span so critical to grab attention in first 3 seconds.

• Participate in challenges and trends - big bonus if can relate back to niche.

• Write down a list of ideas, rank them and get filming.

• There’s no such thing as failure.

• No limit to number of videos you can post daily – more the better.

• Make 80% existing content and 20% exploratory content to see what works.

• Leverage exiting videos, use the most catchy clips.

• Use trending songs in videos.

TikTok Algorithm:

• Video is pushed out to a focus group, algorithm looks at engagement.

• If good metrics then will push video out to larger and larger audiences.

• Key metrics are watch time, shares, likes and comments.

• Every single video has opportunity for virality.

• Patience is a virtue, videos can take time to get views.

• Reposting is good option to give videos another chance.

Analytics:

• Watch time is most important metric.

• Video 8-12 seconds long, want watch time to be max 1-1.5 seconds off this.

• Video 60 seconds long, need minimum 30-40 seconds watch time.

• If can hit 40 seconds watch time on 60 second video then this will likely go viral

• 5-6 second video needs exact time of video or longer.

• 2 second video won't go anywhere.

Content Monetisation:

• Paid by artist or record label to use music.

• Sponsored by brands to promote products.

• Advertise own products or services.

• Paid to promote branded challenge

• Create commercials for brands.