Success on social media can often seem like a flip of a coin. Sometimes, even when you think you’re posting great content, the views just aren’t coming in. TikTok, as we have discussed before, is the newest social media giant to enter the market – and one many of our clients are eager to find success on. Many small brands across countless industries and sectors have seen incredible success on TikTok, which has led to rapid growth in their digital presence.
We’ve seen many businesses take on the TikTok algorithm and not succeed as they had hoped, and we’ve written many guides on how we think it is best to implement TikTok in your marketing.
To ensure the advice we have been offering clients and audiences across the UK over the past few months has been sound, we’ve put our social media team to the test.
How far can we make it on TikTok?
Learn about everything we’ve learnt from our successes, and failures, on the TikTok platform and how we can help you tap into the TikTok algorithm below!
Overview
First, let’s set the scene for our little test. We went into TikTok with as open a mind as possible. We didn’t set content or post schedules out too far in advance and kept our eyes on competitors in our field who also made TikToks. We agreed to get the whole team involved to star in the videos, and we weren’t afraid to get crazy with the content we’d create!
How We Began our TikTok Journey
We posted our first TikTok on the 24th of November, 2021. We started early on by looking for content that filed two unique criteria. First, we wanted to post content unique to our business, as many small businesses have succeeded in doing. Alongside this, we also wanted to post topical content that harnessed the virality of the latest trends.
Keeping these two goals in mind, our very first video was a quick tour as we went on a Christmas office decoration hunt!
As of today, this video has 683 views – not bad for a first attempt. Views over the Christmas period stayed at around 300-600 views, with two key exceptions.
Our fifth video relating to our Christmas decorations was the first to hit over 1k views and now resides at over 1.5k views. Yet our video of our Web Developer Tom putting those same decorations together only got 85. Why is that?
We spotted two critical differences between the two that we feel lead to a reduction in views.
First, we used our own original sound for the video of Tom. A sound is the background audio, voiceover or music placed on a TikTok. This can be taken from other popular videos, TikToks own library of songs, or created by yourself.
Second, the video showcasing the decorations was significantly shorter than the video of Tom putting them up. We used these points to guide our content further on as we continued with TikTok.
Work Hard, Play Hard
As we continued past the Christmas period on TikTok, we moved our content to blend topical / trending content with informational guides on our business and practices. We started hopping on trends spotted by our team and giving overviews of our work.
The more business related content started off strong, with around 1000 views each on these two TikToks:
However, these more informational TikToks failed to capture a consistent audience, with viewership fluctuating wildly per video. Conversely, our skit-focussed content based on the latest trends was now pulling in a consistent 300-800 views.
It was here that we also noticed a trend. Videos that feature text on the preview thumbnail of the TikTok seemed to provide consistently higher views.
Our best guess? Picture your average TikTok viewer. They are looking for maybe 5-10 minutes of content at most, and you’re competing with the Charli D’Amelios of the world.
Creating funny, approachable content that grabs attention with a captivating concept, easily understandable and displayed, may just be the way to draw your average viewer in!
Viral Success
Now, we get on to the fun part. If you work in an office or are at least not working from home under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard of Wordle. If not, we’ve done a guide on the fun word-guessing game that captures social media channels every day here! So, on a whim, we decided to film our Wordle guesses for the day on TikTok.
We hit 50k views very shortly after, in the same timeframe we were used to getting 600. Soon, we were at 100k. By the time it was time to record another, we had hit 150k, and views are still climbing to this day. We had successfully gone viral on TikTok!
So, what made these videos so successful? Our viral Wordle content consisted of long-form videos by TikTok standards, some even reaching 2 minutes in length. They also were not tied to a famous sound from another creator, yet the series was breaking new milestones with each upload.
Our Wordle series combined the two goals we had set out from the very beginning for our TikTok content. Topical and focussing on a unique aspect of our business.
General audiences got hooked in by the trending topic and stayed to see us all in the office struggling to figure out five-letter words.
Views have remained consistently high for our Wordle series, with one follow up video hitting over 200k views. Engagement is high, too, with audiences even supporting specific team members.
This massive wave of viewership has also started to carry on to our other content. For example, our more comedic videos now see an average of 1,000 views per video, and our follower count is now at over 700.
How to Succeed on TikTok
If our time on TikTok has told us anything, it’s that experimenting with the content you provide is critical. We’d like to believe that each video we made follows the sound practices laid out by experts in the field and is of consistently high quality – yet the viewer count doesn’t reflect that.
We tried shorter content, longer content, humorous content, educational content… All of which had wildly varying view counts. It would seem that the TikTok algorithm is a nebulous and unforgiving one. It won’t push any of your content too far until you find the perfect video it’s looking for. Then, your growth is truly exponential.
Don’t expect a slow climb to the top on TikTok, and don’t expect stagnation to be the key to success. The audience you’ll be reaching loves trends, and the algorithm knows that. So create a mix of topical content and content unique to your skillset, focusing on hooking viewers in initially.
TikTok pushes videos that keep eyes glued on the screen, so don’t just film your daily office grind. Instead, shoot a few nerf guns, solve a few Wordles and make great content! If you’re lucky and you hit the algorithm just right, your success is guaranteed.
Of course, if you want to see rapid success on TikTok without the hassle, we’re here to help. Wildfire Marketing has a proven and growing track record in creating successful TikTok content online. As the number one SEO Agency in Leeds, our social media team is hyper-driven to find the latest trends and produce the content you need to succeed. To learn more about the services we offer, including social media marketing and more, check out more of our guides.
Contact us today to ignite your social media marketing and tap into the TikTok algorithm.