How to succeed on TikTok (2021 ver.)

A.K.A. how to wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy.

As age-revealing as this is, I swear I do know how TikTok (app) works as much as I know how TikTok (song) goes.

But hold up, if you’re just going to be on TikTok to start dancing alone in your room like millions of other Gen Z-ers that have come before you, get out now. We don’t need yet another twerking teen!

So if you’re not dancing on TikTok, how else can you succeed (read: become famous)?

You have 2 paths, young Padawan.

1. Have an identity.
2. Go nuts

Let’s talk about having an identity first. Take a scroll through your TikTok feed and have a look at the accounts that you’re following. Notice how each and every one of them has a niche? It could be anything, from singing to acting, photography hacks or style lookbooks. But these TikTokers have found the one thing that they’re good at and they are owning it.

There is no sure-win formula to replicate when it comes to getting your content out there into the vast sea of short videos, for sure. But it’s definitely more feasible to focus on one thing you’re really good at and go deep than cast your net wide and see what comes up.

For example, if you have a really cute cat, milk it. (I don’t mean literally, geez who raised you?) But take Abram Engle for example. His feed is filled with a wide variety of videos ranging from dancing with his cat to reviewing products and sick basketball shots. But his top three TikToks in 2021 so far, as well as the videos that consistently get higher-than-average views are the ones that feature his cat, Kurt.

Even the videos that don’t feature Kurt are asking for Kurt #TeamKurt

Or just look somewhere a little closer to home. Bloomr.SG Creator, WahBanana was known for their comedy sketches when they first started on Youtube and now they’ve ventured into TikTok with the same style of skits and have amassed close to half a million followers.

In fact, the moment you start to deviate from your niche into something that you’re not just to “ride on the trend”, the awkwardness and discomfort shines through and that’s when the TikToks truly veer into the realm of r/cringetopia.

All in all, the key to this is to be authentic. Don’t get a cat just for TikTok, don’t force yourself to be somebody that you’re not just for social media and it will pay off.

Now let’s talk about going nuts. The first thing that you must know about social media platforms is that each one of them has an algorithm that sorts content onto your feed based on what they think would be relevant to you, instead of chronological order. This is based on a mixture of machine learning and data science.

Looking at you, Instagram

Simply put, the more you consume and interact with the content that you like, the more the machine learns what to show you in the future. Similarly for creators, the more content you post and the more your audience interacts with your account will, in turn, send data signals telling the machine to feed more of such type of content to them in the future. So tip #1: post consistently.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the next step can be rationalised into simply telling the machine that your content is relevant to your audience.

For TikTok specifically, how you can tell the system that your content is relevant can be either one or a combination of these ways:

First up, by using trending sounds. One of the big features of TikTok is the huge library of sounds that you can choose from. The trending sounds are usually used for a certain trend or challenge but who’s to say that you can’t use them to your advantage?

Typically the popular sounds are the ones that you hear over and over and over again as you try not to blow your brains ou- I mean scroll through your feed. Incorporate them into your video and you have a shot at getting your content seeded farther and wider.

Second, tagging #fyp #foryoupage. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Now, we can’t totally be sure that using #fyp and #foryoupage is definitely going to get your content on the For You page, but as with every other social media platform, hashtags are a great way to discover new and relevant content to your interests.

Next, with attention spans shorter than goldfishes, when a user watches a video all the way till the end, it tells the platform that they were interested and engaged throughout the video, thus sending the signal to continue pushing similar content onto their feeds.

If you’ve read up till this point, congrats — here’s a hack for you. If your video has a great punchline, tell your audience to watch till the end in your caption so they know that they can expect something. Don’t try this if your video does not have a strong ending, it will backfire and kill any positive feeling they might have for your channel.

Or if you want to be cheekier, create a looping video with a transition that is as seamless as you can manage to get the audience to watch it multiple times before they realise what’s going on.

But here’s the ultimate hack.

Use a combination of both — having strong identity and going nuts trying out all the different things you can do on TikTok, and there’s no reason why you won’t succeed. At the end of the day, you’re definitely going to build a community of online friends while learning so much and having fun and that is success in itself.

(Or you could just be pretty and easily get millions of followers. It’s 2021, you do you boo.)