Using TikTok’s Algorithm To Your Advantage
With so much content and so many niche communities, what can you do to ensure that your TikTok content reaches your audience? Here are some tips for using TikTok’s algorithm to your advantage.
The concept of an algorithm can feel abstract for many. The good news is that TikTok has a rather simple approach to finding and engaging with content. The main components the algorithm looks for can be pinpointed to four things:
Watch Time
Shares
Comments
Likes
Essentially, user interaction influences the growth in your audience. This is what sets TikTok apart from other platforms. Follower count does not hold precedence, which gives new or smaller accounts the opportunity to have high reach. Instead, the amount of user interaction and the kinds of interaction you receive will send signals to the algorithm, which will then send more people to your content.
According to this TikTok, created by an influencer with nearly 500,000 followers and over 5 million likes, “[TikTok] will reward you for keeping people on their app.” This means that if you have people watching the majority of the duration of your videos, the algorithm will send more people to your video so that more people will remain on the app. This is where “Watch Time” comes into play.
Video completion rate, which indicates the amount of people who watched your video from beginning to end, plays the most substantial part in bringing in more viewers. The more people that watch your TikTok in its entirety, the more popular the video will be.
Even in cases where they don’t watch an entire video, every second counts. Let’s say a video is one minute long. If a person watches 50% of the video, that is enough to tell the algorithm to send more people to your video.
However, the algorithm isn’t the only entity sending people to your content. It can be the users themselves.
Not only does it matter how often people are sharing your content, but the ways in which they are doing so does too. Are they direct-messaging it to friends? Are they saving your TikTok to their own camera roll? Are they sending it to people outside of the app?
The method of sharing matters because this is driving traffic to the TikTok app and keeping people there. Such traffic will be rewarded with even more people being brought to your content.
In essence, when you bring more people to the app, the algorithm brings people to your content.
Another type of user interaction that can help your growth happens in the comments section. Once again, the amount does not matter here. Instead, the type of comments you get make a bigger difference than the number of comments you have.
Comments that only consist of emojis aren’t really acknowledged by the algorithm because it is recognized as something that could have been posted by a bot. However, if unique things are being said within your comments, it tells the algorithm that people are actually having a conversation. Thus, the algorithm will send more people to the video so that they, too, can add to the conversation.
Likes have the least amount of impact on the reach of your content on TikTok. However, anything can help, and the more likes that a video has, the better it can do in the algorithm.
Learning how a platform operates is an important step of content creation. You are now a few steps closer to optimizing your reach.
This article was written by Trinity Worthy. Asibey Consulting has no affiliation with TikTok. All of our reviews and recommendations are independently selected and we receive no compensation for them.