Episode Transcript
going viral on Tiktok is like the Holy Grail for agencies, everyone imagines that day that you've got a viral video and you're telling your client, we've gone viral. And yet, it is difficult. But there is a way, particularly for brands to go viral. And it's a process that we've gone through many times. And in today's podcast, we're gonna go through that process step by step. Now, to start, we need to talk a little bit about the history of the social media algorithms. So back in the day, Facebook was basically your feed was chronological, right? Your post your make posts, posted something, you'd see that another mate posted something after it, you'd see that and it would just like be a chronological timeline. Then in 2008 2009, Facebook released the edge algorithm, or it's called Edge rank, right, but we'll just call it the edge algorithm. And it was incredibly controversial. And by the way, all of the algorithms have been sequentially controversial. So essentially, the edge algorithm started to select content to boost within the feet. And so started the game of trying to understand and manipulate the algorithms, okay. Now, one of the things that, like, I think marketers often forget is, what's the point of the algorithm? There are, lots of people have, like, strange ideas of why these algorithms exist to collect data or to, you know, for Secret Services purposes. And all of this nonsense. It's not true, it only has one purpose, all of the algorithms only have a single purpose. That purpose is to keep the user in the app. Okay, that's it. Now, yes, they collect a lot of data. But ultimately, it's the content that keeps the user in the app. And why do they need to keep the user in the app, because they monetize your eyes, they monetize your eyeballs. Essentially, I've always got this phrase, in my mind. If an app is free, then know that you are the product. And in the case of social media apps, they are free. But you're the product. And for you to be the product, what they need to do is they need to keep you in the app as long as possible, the longer you're in the app, the more advertising revenue that they can generate. That's it. That's the purpose. Now, collecting all of that data serves additional purposes around that purpose. But ultimately, all of the algorithms, their only aim is to keep you in the app so they can sell ad revenue, okay? There are sort of wider societal purposes, and they're more ideological based on the company. But the algorithms themselves are only designed to keep you in the app. So edge algorithm was the first then you had the first version of the Instagram algorithm and the first version of the Twitter algorithm and then Instagram went full feed, then you had the LinkedIn algorithm. And then YouTube's algorithm started to focus on dwell time or video time, how long the video was being watched for, and things kind of evolved incrementally, incrementally on LinkedIn as well. The algorithms started to evolve incrementally. And then tick tock came along, tick tock was the first of the algorithms to use artificial intelligence. Now, this is a really important point for this podcast, because systematic understandings of the algorithms work for all the platforms, but not for Tiktok. By the very nature of an AI driven driven algorithm. The algorithm changes, therefore the rules change, okay. And this is why so often, it's frustrating to watch sort of content creators on Tik Tok, giving sort of fixed generic advice, okay, there are some fixed generic things that you should do, you should always have Video quality, high video quality, you should always have stories, you should always have a hook, you should always have a payoff. These things are generic, and they're true across all platforms. But there is no there is no like panacea, you can't just do this one thing and get a viral video, it just doesn't work like that on tick tock. And the reason it doesn't work like that on tick tock is because the very nature of the algorithm is that it changes and it changes essentially, by itself. It is constantly learning. That's why it's really important to understand these algorithms so that you can understand how to work within the rules of the environment to create a video that will go viral. Now, what's the advantage of going viral? Look for brands the advantage of going viral is reach, okay, greater reach and oftentimes that will even mean greater sales, greater leads, whatever but generally speaking, it's about greater reach, okay. And it is fundamentally different for a brand than it is for an individual content creator. Alright, Right. So like, one of the challenges that that we face with our clients is that there's nobody in the company who's willing to do this, put their face to the brand. Unless it's like a founder, a founder run company, and then then it's relatively straightforward. So oftentimes, you're sort of working within the confines of having been able to create content that is faceless. Yeah. But still engaging, and still hits all of the touch points. And we do have a process and we go through, I'm going to go through that process with you today. But the fundamental takeaway is this, it is harder for brands to go viral than individuals, it just is. Okay. So that's something to keep in mind. And by the way, the algorithm kind of like promotes that, because individuals won't boost their posts, individuals won't pay our revenue, but brands will. Alright, so there is a reason for that. And it's almost always a financial reason. But generally speaking, brand content can go viral and does go viral. And in fact, almost all of our clients have got a number of viral videos on their account and the way that we've achieved that. And by the way, almost all of them are faceless, too. And the way that we've achieved that is this process that that I'm going to go through. So I just wanted to spend a bit of time that just talking about like the history of the algorithms and why, why they're so important, and how the social media companies themselves view these algorithms, just keep in mind, their only objective is to keep the user in the app. That's it. Now, if they're able to do that, they're able to sell more advertising revenue, they're able to drive their profitability. So you as a creator, you as an agency, you as a brand, just need to keep that in mind. How can I create content that will keep users in the app? All right. Now, the first thing that we do, I'm gonna just go through like the steps. Yeah. So the first thing that we do is that we take around let's, let's choose, let's say it's a relatively easy one. There are some easy brands, by the way, travel food desert. So let's choose a travel brand that we work with. And so we will start with research. And we'll reset all of the platforms, by the way, right? Not just tick tock, and we'll research what brands and content creators are doing that goes viral. And this is a really important step, okay. Because oftentimes, what people will do is they'll search, let's say, hashtag travel or whatever it is, on the platform, then they'll see a video with a high view rate, and a high engagement rate, or sorry, a high number of views and a high number of engagements. And they assume that to be a viral video, but it isn't necessarily a viral video. virality by itself, is actually a video or a piece of content going above and beyond what would be expected for the size of that account. So if you have a million followers, and you have a video that gets 700,000 views, that's a high number of views, but that's not necessarily a viral video, okay? So it's really important to when you scroll through the content, and you're you find something that's got a high number of views a high number of engagements to then go to the account, look at the account, look at the number of followers they have and do an engagement rate analysis, yeah, or do a view rate analysis. And what you're looking for is multiples of followers. So if you've got 50 followers, you're looking for, you know, 500 views, that would mean that, you know, that video is on its way to, to, to variety, maybe it may be early in its process. But you also need to keep in mind whether they've run ads. And often it's easy enough to see whether they've written ads, because the number of views will be high, but the actual engagements will be significantly lower than you would expect. And if you do this as a process over and over and over again, it will become pretty obvious to you which videos are actually going viral or which pieces of content are actually going viral versus which ones are just high volume, because the account is high volume, or high volume because of ads, they they become quite obvious. What you're looking for in this process is to find those pieces of content. And then to understand the structure of it, what is it that they did that made that video go viral? And again, if you do that over and over again, you'll see sort of patterns of types of content.
Once you've done that, and we find it easier to do that as a team, right? So there'll be three people on a specific client niche and they'll go away for a day, they'll do that research, then they'll come back. And then on the second day, what we'll do is we'll brainstorm and we'll brainstorm like maybe 50 different ideas about types of content that we could create for this account that has a chance of going viral. All right. So we'll brainstorm all of that content and we'll have our list of Whatever it is 3040 50 ideas, and then we'll start to weed through them. What we're looking for are three, we want three ideas every month. All right, so let's assume this 30 days in a month, typically, we will do two, which are existing ideas from the research, and one which is brand new, like nobody's done it, or we haven't seen that type of content go viral before. And there's a really important reason for that, right is, you can jump on a trend on tick tock. And it has a good chance, right. But because the algorithm is constantly changing, new trends are emerging all the time. And it's a lot more powerful to be the start of a trend than it is to be halfway through or toward the end of a trend. So you've got to have, you've got to give yourself that like one that one go at being the start of a trend every month. So once we've got those three ideas, we will then sort of set out the storyboard for each video idea. Now often, like I said, we can't do this right face to camera stuff. So the idea is within like the research phase, the idea is, is limited to things that you can do without somebody in front of the camera. All right. And if that's the case, then that's what we do. And so we only have those ideas, and we will get them down. Based on that. Now. We'll then sort of storyboard the three ideas. And we'll do one example of each to make sure that every frame is perfect. The key thing on Tech Talk is that you shouldn't have a wasted frame, right? People, the length of time of your video is irrelevant. All of your slides, or the number of slides that you have is irrelevant, right? You could go viral with a six second video, you could go viral with a six minute video, it really depends on how many wasted frames that are. All right, what I mean by wasted frames are like frames or moments or seconds that don't add value to the entire conversation. So this entire podcast, for example, would be terrible for Tik Tok. Because I posted this whole thing, there's a lot of me going man and jumping from point to point and it's not necessarily completely engaging. What's really important is to keep the audience engaged the entire time, whatever that length of time is. So don't think about time, don't worry about time. Again, it's an AI driven algorithm, which means that the, the average or ideal length of time of a viral video varies, right? It's not like Facebook, on Facebook. If your video isn't more than three minutes, you can't monetize that video, right? So you'll see if you look through your Facebook feed, that there is a disproportionate number of videos that are between three minutes and three minutes and 30 seconds. And that's because the content creators know that they're the only ones or things that are other three minutes are the only ones that can be monetized, right? It's not like that on tick tock, what it's all about engagement. So make sure there's no wasted frames, kill frames that are of no value. So we'll do that for each one of the three examples. And we'll get it to the point. And this may take four or five days to get it exactly right where there's no wasted frames. Once we've done that, we will create 10 of each of those videos every day. Now, that's obviously a big undertaking for an individual or a brand. But it is worth it, I guarantee it. So once we've got like our 10 videos, we'll post them in the app, right, so we'll post them every day. So it'll be video type one, then on day two, video type two, then on day three, video type three. And we'll do that sequence over and over again for the entire month. And so essentially, what we've, what we're buying are with our effort, right, what we're buying with our effort are 30 bullets aiming at a target called virality. Now, we're going to take 30 shots in a month. Yeah. And based on the research, there is a chance that one of those shots will go. Yeah, and typically. Actually, mostly it doesn't happen in the first month mostly happens in the second or the third month. But it does happen, right. And sometimes it happens on the first one. And that has happened actually one time it happened on the very first video, but that's really rare. Typically, you got to go through this process, you got to go through the systematic process. And then once we've got those 30 videos out, we don't analyze them every day. We don't sit there refreshing to see what's going on. We just do the work post the video, and then at the end of the month, we'll go through all of the data together. Okay, what worked from this, what didn't work from this? What was the dwell time? What was the view time? What was the engagement rate for every one of the videos right? Can we optimize this actually, is this entire these 10 videos? Did they do nothing at all right? Let's ditch that idea. Let's bring in a different one. And so we'll go through that process systematically over and over and over again and then one day it'll just pop and we know it pops because we've done it so Often Now, the other element of the TIC tock algorithm, which people really find frustrating is that it can be really random, right? So suddenly, you can have like 5000 views when the average was 100. But it doesn't get to 500,000 views or 5000 or 5 million views. And you're like, Okay, well, maybe if I just do that again, and again and again. And the thing is that one of the main elements of the TIC tock algorithm that people don't tend to focus on is that essentially what the algorithm has done is gamified. Creation of content through randomness, right. So if you think about the algorithms purpose, from a consumers perspective, its purpose is to keep me and my eyes inside the app. So what it does is it makes sure that the content that will keep me engaged is on my feet. And it promotes that content to ensure that I stay in the app. But from the other side of the equation, what Tiktok have done is they've gamified, the content creation element. And they do that, firstly, if you create a new account, and you post your first three videos, almost always, those first three videos will have a higher and get a higher reach and a higher engagement than the subsequent videos. And that's designed as by designed to encourage the content creator to keep going, keep trying, it's there, just keep going. Right. And people do. And people keep trying to create the content. But they also do it with randomness. So they'll create sort of random spikes in the videos. And you see this sometimes, like we had this actually just yesterday, where we had a video, which we posted a month ago, and it suddenly went viral. And it actually went viral. Now this could be one of two things, it could have been that random behavior. But it also could have been a change in the algorithm. Like I said, it's an AI algorithm. So it learns from its own data. And it could have said, Oh, hold on, this kind of content is actually going now. And so it flies and lots of content creators have this where they'll see that old videos, sort of increasing in value, certainly. So that's the process that that we go through. And it has kind of worked every time, right? It works that every client basically that we that we that we work with, it can be an expensive process, because you know, there's a lot of content that you have to create, but it can be incredibly valuable. So let me give you a couple of examples. So we had a peanut butter brand. That was a client. And so this peanut butter brand, was in a very small target market, and they wanted part of our overall marketing strategy was sort of geographic expansion. And so we started creating with this process, and you know, one of the main things that we were doing is creating like recipes with this peanut butter and doing the recipe videos, you know, that really fast recipe, clipping with ASMR sort of audio, and, you know, the, you know, the type of video I'm talking about, right? So that we thought, okay, this will work. And it kind of did, it had some impact. But actually, the video that went viral was an a behind the scenes in the factory. Now, this went instantly, it wasn't one of those where we waited 24 hours, it popped instantly. And it reached 3 million views within like 48 hours.
The net effect of that was that this particular client had 18 inbound leads for international distribution, and they closed four of those inbound leads. It was transformative for the business, I mean, their top line just transformed as a result of this video. Now, if McKinsey or KPMG came in and analyze that business, they'd say, Oh, it's that video that did it. You know, what we should do is do more of that video. And actually, that's not the case. What did it was the 52 videos before it, because it's a process of continuous improvement. Right? And through that process, we reached the final like that next step. It's not the final step. But it's that next step, which was the viral video. And then that led itself to more viral videos. One of the things that happens by the way, when you get a viral video, is that all of the previous videos get a big bump in views and engagement. All right. So sometimes through that process, another one of those historic videos also goes so through this process, what we've found is that, you know, you can always get to a point of a viral video on multiple viral videos, but it takes patience and it takes being organized and systematic. There are a lot of content creators on there who are giving advice on how to create Tik Tok and I don't want to disparage any of them. Because, generally speaking, everyone's trying to do the right thing in terms of guiding people toward viral videos, but I will I would suggest that the majority of them are using a heuristic a mindset that is based on the previous algorithms, right? That's based on edge that's based on Instagram and all of that. Those algorithms are essentially fixed rules, which if you understand over a period of time, you can work with him, right? Tick tock is not fixed. The algorithm changes all the time, I don't know how many times a year, week, month, day, hour. Second, I don't know how many times the algorithm is changing, but it changes. And therefore, what you really need to do is you need to create a system and a process that works within the changes of the algorithm. So that you are essentially either creating a trend or jumping off the bat on the back of a trend. And a few other little points, I think music is something that I'm always asked about. So reels and tick tock, totally different. Okay. So in terms of music, that was really important to know is that sometimes a specific song or a specific piece of music will be going viral because of the videos that it's associated with. But that music has its own audience, right. And so if you're a brand, you don't want to, you want to somehow target people that you're interested in within the scope of the content, it's not just about the volume, it's also about the quality of people who are engaging in terms of their relevance to your brand. So be careful not to choose music, which is deliberately associated with an incredibly young audience, if you want a 30 plus audience, and it is important to do more research on it, if you're a content creator, it's not so important, is it right, because essentially, what you want is volume. And so, because you monetize that volume, regardless of the demographic, but if you're a brand, you want the volume to be able to sell a product, and therefore, this, the demographic of that audience is important. And therefore, the music that you select must fit or should fit within that demographic, it's not just about going viral, and it changes a lot. So if a piece of music is currently viral, and you want to post a video, using that music, you're probably too late. Alright, man, if you go to tiktoks ad tools, they do show you the music that's on an upward trend, it's better to choose the stuff that's on an upward trend, rather than the stuff that's already at its peak, okay, and other things, hashtags, creating content in the app. But all the apps prefer that you create content in the app, they all prefer it. It's like this a standard thing. And the reason they prefer it isn't because they want you to spend ages on the app, although that's helpful. It's because they can collect all the metadata from the video. So if you create the content in the app, they can collect things that they wouldn't be able to collect if you created the video on a an external camera and imported it. But ultimately, the impact of that is minuscule compared to the quality of the content itself. Right. So again, if you're a content creator, I would suggest it's more important than if you're a brand and hashtags. There isn't a sweet spot on Tik Tok, that just isn't like, we've had videos go viral with no hashtags. And if there is a sweet spot, we haven't worked out what it is yet, I see so many videos that people say oh, you should use three hashtags. Or we did this experiment. And we saw that, you know, the majority of viral videos had two hashtags, or the majority of viral videos had four hashtags. It's kind of self defeating, because that saying that a is related to b, whereas a may not be related to b in any way, shape, or form. That may just be that people who are content creators who have worked on other platforms, keep in their mind that they should only use two hashtags. I mean, you could have 30 hashtags and still go viral. There's no, there's there's nothing that should use hashtags. Yes, it's good for the user, because users often search by hashtag. And the only thing that I would suggest is that the copy within the content directly relates to the audience or the video that you're producing. Right? So again, don't don't just use like the overly verbose copy for no reason, use copy that's like directly related to the video. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is you're trying to get the algorithm to understand what is this video because it's not a real person sat there watching every video, if it was they could look at it. Like in 1998 when people were creating directories of the internet, you know, the Yahoo's and Alta Vista 's of the world, there were people who would go to websites, they'd look at a website and then put it in this category or that category. And that was like a real thing that that people did that companies did. It's obviously not happening with tick tock so you need to help the algorithm understand what you're what your video is, especially by the way, if you're speaking in an uncommon language, right, so if you're speaking in English, obviously, it'll work Mandarin, obviously, it'll work and you know, Arabic mostly will work French, most of the work. But if you're speaking in, you know, bare bare dialect of Morocco, right, you got to work a little bit harder to make sure that your content, you're copying the content is clear for the algorithm to understand who you are. Alright, hopefully, that's helpful. I've got a few questions from the audience. I'm going to go through, let's just do two or three of them. Okay, okay. So we've got Alex, who is a social media manager in the food industry. He works for a gourmet burger chain. We've been trying to break into tick tock but struggling to go viral. If you're in the food industry, and you're struggling to go viral, don't you do me? Sorry. Like, that's the easiest of all the industries, maybe travel is a bit easier, right? But just do that process go through, it's not going to be hard. Find the videos that are working particularly for burgers, right. So there are very specific shots, you know that the bike shot the clip shot ASMR, you've got to just like follow the sequence. Find that stuff, create your three ideas, and just rinse and repeat over and over and over again, you will go viral, just get used the process and you'll go viral. Maybe two more. So Priya, who is in the retail fashion sector working for a midsize fashion brand. Our challenge on tick tock is to make fashion content that stands out. And what are your tips for fashion brands to create unique trending content that resonates with the Tik Tok audience. This is really important, particularly in the fashion industry, because typically, Instagram is more associated with fashion. But obviously there's loads of fashion content on tick tock, and the particular brand that prayer works for is very well known for that ethical and humanitarian work. And so what I would do if I were you, prayer is, again, go through the process, find the two things that are working well, but then that one every month, that one set with 10 videos every month that you choose, I would focus on behind the scenes in your factories, which are not, which are well, I know because of the brand, I really well set out that they really care about their employees. And so I would show that I would give like a behind the scenes, you can also by the way, do a behind the scenes of the the fashion designers, you know how they go through the process of creating. So I would choose something that's like a little bit different away from the traditional fashion industry content, and to create like a sort of a wider view of your company. You talk a lot about that element of your business on your website. And so I bring that to life in Tik Tok, or I'm gonna do one more. Let's choose Jinmao, who is an entrepreneur in the tech startup space, founder of an app startup app right on tick tock presents as in well, how can tech companies like ours use tick tock effectively considering our content is more informational than entertaining.
If you are only going to create informational content, unless that information is also entertaining, you are really going to struggle on Tik Tok, you really have to find a way to be entertaining. Now, there are some simple things that you can do. One of them is to gamify your content, make games use sliders as opposed to videos and make games have you know, quizzes that I'm not all about having like, you know, a prize at the end, just something that will keep someone engaged with it exactly the swiping? Did I get it right? You're in the top 1% If you can get all 10, right, something like that. They're the kinds of hooks that tend to work and then create games. So wouldn't just be posting informational stuff. And we do that on our brand. We only generally post informational stuff. We don't generally post videos that are deliberately there to drive reach. But we did that because that's kind of our ethos, the people who know our brand know our brand and followers and so we do that to help in training other marketers. We're kind of more interested in helping other marketers become better than we are in getting new clients. That's not really our primary objective of our content. Alright, so I hope you enjoyed this episode of the coffee with Coach podcast. Join me next week, and we'll be talking about something else haven't decided what to do.
