How to Translate Your Medium Articles to Tik Tok (with a Walk-Through, Detailed Example!)
Have you been writing on Medium for a while and looking for new ways to communicate your ideas in an attempt to grow your brand? Maybe it’s time to look at social media — specifically Tik Tok.
Tik Tok in 2021 beat out Google (and other tech giants as well) for the most popular website in the world . One reason for its success was capitalizing on user behavior. Google is the go to place for users when they want to know something whereas Tik Tok is for when users get bored. This difference made all the difference.
In this article, I want to share how to translate your existing articles in a format suitable for Tik Tok. Then, I will walk through an example of actually translating one of my own essays into a 30 second Tik Tok video. By studying the accounts below then walking through that process, I hope to inspire all of you to continue to share your ideas.
Let’s get started
If you’ve heard of BookTok, you’ve heard of this account. Kendra’s minute long book review videos receive thousands of likes. Her most recent one,Colleen Hoover’s Reminders of Him, received 23.2k likes in just a week. For a two minute review post, it’s not a bad reach. Let’s deconstruct what’s going on in this video. First, Kendra puts her humorous personality on display. She expresses her opinions in creative, funny ways a lot of viewers can relate too. When she describes the plot, she keeps it detail-oriented. For example, she describes certain characters by their traits: jobs, physical appearance, etc, making it easy to understand and thus consume. This book review, and all of her videos in general, tell a story without even trying: I’m referring to the space she’s in. The background of the room she’s filming in tells a unique story. The aesthetically decorated shelves piling with books brands her channel as “the reader girl”. Lastly, even in her popular videos, she includes hashtags booklovers making it easier for the algorithm to share her content with people who would really enjoy it.
Takeaway #1 — Be yourself, brand yourself and don’t forget to hashtag
The titles of Sho Dewan’s videos remind me of the most popular Medium articles. His videos are very matter-of-fact with arguable content, but with likes totalling 5 million (they were at 4.9 million when I started this paper wow!) and a follower count of 318.8 thousand, he’s doing something right. He brands himself as the “career coach” and his videos attempt to do just that: provide career advice. Also, we again we see takeaway #1 in action with the branding utilized in his name as career coach. In his most recent post What matters to Most Companies, Dewan stitches together a previously viral meme as an intro to his video. Here we see the utilization of popular memes in an attempt to spread his post to all of our feeds.
Takeaway#2 — Engaging titles and utilization of existing viral videos when creating content
In my opinion, one of the cons with medium is being able to interact with readers. There’s an implicit hierarchy in the structure where the author and their opinion is top and the rest of commentators are at the bottom. Even if an author was to engage with the readers in the comment section, the design itself doesn’t entice viewers as everyone who wants to engage is stuck silently at the bottom.
Tik Tok’s comment section is designed in a way for creators to engage and respond to the comments. This feature allowed creators another pathway to virality, as was the case for the account @andthispotato. Her video where she responded to a user comment, “What is the Heterosexual Double Bind, by describing it is the most popular video, accounting for ⅕ of all her likes that total in the millions.
Takeaway #3: Engage with comments and users
Now, I’ll be applying these takeaways in a Tik Tok video. The essay of choice I will be turning into a video is Why She Wins: The Power and Privilege of the Female Scammer. I chose this essay because it seems the easiest to turn into an easy to consume, engaging video as discussed in takeaway #2. The structure of my video includes lots of text in black and white formats. This was not a takeaway, but was common among popular videos that shared information. Structure like this fulfills two goals: keep the viewer interested and provides a way for users to easily follow along.
The content of my video is simple. My video makes use of lots of text in order to go through the main points of the essay. It sounds boring, but that’s takeaway #2 comes into play. By adding upbeat, viral music, you’ll be surprised how much livelier it appears. In takeaway #1, we learned that hashtags can be powerful. I included these hashtags: #elizabethholmes #ghislainemaxwell #mtg #fyp #privilege.
Lastly, I wanted to note a really important point if your goal is to go viral (whatever viral means to you) — consistency is key. Some of the most successful Tik Tokers post 3–5 times a day. Not all of their videos are great, some even do bad; but it’s the effort that counts. Translating written articles to attention-grabbing videos consistently is no easy task. I hope this article has provided an insightful tips to help you get started on your next video.
Example of turning my essay into a Tik Tok video https://www.tiktok.com/@notafinancebro1/video/7051792357066591534?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1
