Published in

Spread Your Content

9 min readApr 5, 2020

Hey, so I don’t have confessions exactly, but I do definitely have some keen insights you have to hear. To be fair to me I couldn’t help but use that title to grab your attention — Obviously did the trick, so now you can make me king of ultra woke content marketing gurus please, I’ll take my crown on the way out…

For real though I have a SAAS business called Spread.Software, what we do isn’t important to you, but how we get our brand in front of our target audience is incredibly relevant to you.

I recently d̶o̶u̶b̶l̶e̶d̶, t̶r̶i̶p̶l̶e̶d̶, QUADRUPLED down on TikTok.

Simply because there is 0 competition on there right now, yet has over 500 million users… This is a once in a lifetime opportunity you simply can’t miss out on again.

I know as a business owner you don’t have hours to spend on content marketing and you’ve probably been burnt in the past with instagram, getting 5 likes on a post you spent all day on, sound all too painfully similar?

Thank God for both me and you, TikTok has came down as our lord and saviour. If you only follow the fundamentals I have laid out for you below, then your brand will be reaching 100,000’s of views in no time.

Again my brand is a company called Spread and here is a screenshot to prove the title and description are actually very true. Originally I started on TikTok as a theme page to mess around with but then I started building the brand around it.

Better yet, let’s move on to you.

My Top 5 Bulletproof tips below contain everything you need to know about blowing up your TikTok brand with little to no effort… (#4 is experimental).

The slides are just for visual references — the real information is below.

#1 Prioritise Watch time, rewatching and completion rate

TikTok has an unhealthy obsession with how long users are watching content on their platform. Feels a bit needy… But to be fair every social platform optimises around this.

Why? — They want to keep users on their platform for as long as possible to keep them seeing ads, and TikTok is no exception, so let’s dig into it together:

Watch time — Watch time is simply the total watch time in seconds.

A user instantly skipping over one of your videos really harms its performance so you need to Immediately grab attention, the same way I grabbed your attention with the title of this article.

Do anything you can to grab attention. Loud noises, funny sh*t, bold claims, fails, whatever catches attention — the same principle as Facebook ads.

Stop the user in their tracks so much so that they can’t help but continue to watch.

Rewatch rate — The number of times a user rewatched one of your videos.

Rewatch rate is a funny one, and hard to manually increase as it is usually up to the individual user. One way I increased this was by hiding something in the background of the video and asking our users to spot the object and winners would win free software etc. users would go back through the video to find the object — easy rewatch rate increase.

Completion rate — The number of users who watched the video until the end.

For the first 28 days, I was prioritising long-form content (up to one minute), which was working quite well.

However, I realised that my most viral video (2 months later now has over 200k views alone), was the shortest video on my account with less than 20 seconds.

From this, I have tested much shorter content, as little as 8 seconds — which has resulted in a boost in overall performance as completion rate is much easier to reach for every user.

But if you want videos longer than 8 seconds…

If you are making content longer than 30 seconds, then here is a trick I learned from a copywriting book. Humans find it really easy to use “ermms” and “urrhhhs” as fillers in speech to move onto the next topic, but we don’t do this in writing or videos, so throughout your TikTok use phrases like:

“Better yet…”
“But then I…”
“So how did I do that?”
“But it gets better…”

This will cause a natural human response in the user's mind to carry on watching the video and therefore will increase your completion rate.

One more great tip for completion rate is to include in the caption something like “#4 is the most important” — hmmm that sounds familiar??

This forces people to watch until the end, leaving the best until last is a common practice on TikTok to enforce completion, it nearly always works too (guarantee you won't leave this article until #4)

#2 Shares, Likes and Comments

Likes

The old-age question… Do likes matter?

On TikTok it’s a big no no. Likes mean very little on TikTok, obviously it does help your video reach more people on the “for you” page but it isn’t even one of the most important factors. Never ask users to like, don’t optimise videos around likes and your best videos aren’t always the most liked.

Read on to find out what is truly important.

Comments

Comments have much more power over likes on TikTok just like any social media platform, yet they still aren’t even that important.

Comments are still valuable to collect though, at the end of some of your videos, if you have time, I suggest you mention something or ask a question to get more comments, like what the majority of YouTubers do.

When you get comments you have to respond to them. Every single one of them. Your own comments and replies will also boost your video on the algorithm. Make sure to like the ones you reply to as well.

Here comes the big boy factor.

Shares

Now “shares” is where it gets really interesting. Shares have the most fundamental impact (besides watch time) on how much the algorithm will push out your content.

TikTok as a platform is a huge fan of “shares” and values content that is shared by your audience. So much so that when a video is being shared frequently, TikTok will start highlighting the share button in an animated red circle to encourage others to do the same.

Optimising your videos for shares is something a brand that is educating HAS to do. The majority of the content on my feed is based around educating users on content marketing and promotion, as that is what my Saas product helps with. Educational content is always shared so this is ideal for us content marketers out there.

TikTok Tip #3 — Upload time and Batching Content

#3 Uploading Times/Batches

Upload Timing

The best time to upload will depend on the geographical location of your followers, which is found on your business account analytics after 100 followers.

If you haven’t reached that yet then don’t worry you soon will, for the time being, please see this easy table from Influencermarketinghub.com that will show you exactly what time to upload in EST time zone. If you’re from the UK add 4 hours on :)

infulencermarketinghub.com (source link at bottom of page)

Batch Uploading

Should you upload loads of videos in one go? Or separately throughout the day/week?

A TikTok user by the name of @MadyDewey experimented with this exactly and found some interesting results. She found that batching content caused less views on average per video, she therosied that this was due to each video also competing against each other to be shown on your audiences “for you page”.

Therefore videos should be uploaded separately with at least 3–4 hours between them, and at peak times whenever possible.

Source — https://www.tiktok.com/@_madydewey?source=h5_m

#4 Become a Consistent and Reliable Source within Your Niche

You probably read that and thought yeah obviously… But you have no idea why this is so important, right now.

TikTok right now is easy, but it’s going to get hard — real hard. With more and more content creators coming on board every single minute, the competition is rising, fast.

Eventually, there will be a huge amount of content creators on TikTok. The algorithm will favour those that they deem reliable, trustworthy and upload consistently. This will be measured in engagement (watch time, shares, comments etc) and not the number of followers a user has.

So it is much more important to upload with engagement in mind to the smallest possible group and to do so consistently. This builds up an account authority and trust with TikTok that will keep you at the number one spot when more users jump on to take your throne.

TikTop Tip #5 — Find Your Niche and Dominate

#5 Find Your Niche and Double Down

Okay, so I covered a bit about this in the last section but it deserves its own coverage.

You have to establish yourself as a leader within a niche. Finding what niche you want to produce content around is up to you, but what gets views is down to the market (the audience on the “for you page”).

Try out everything surrounding your brand and double down on what gets the most engagement. This takes a lot of time, patience and testing is key. Test everything you can and see what works for you.

What you should aim to do is have a “series” of content, up to 3 per account. Each series should cover a topic and be uploaded consistently. This builds a trusted following around your account for certain topics that you will cover in-depth.

Don’t only aim to upload one viral video and then call it a day. One 100k post isn’t the same as 20 posts with 5k views each. The latter builds far more trust and audience. However viral videos do go a long way and do help with your confidence and overall account growth, so obviously goes without saying that you *should aim* to make viral content.

BONUS TIP!!

Aren’t you a lucky so and so… This last tip is something I want every content marketer, social media marketer and marketing ____ (insert fancy title) to walk away with today.

TEST EVERYTHING. The worst thing that can happen is nobody sees it — win win situation.

When I say test everything I mean in every section of your life and not just marketing. You’re going to find winners, and when you do, let them run.

Clap* Clap* Clap*

SELFISH PLUGGGGG!!!! 😎

Spread is my content repurposing tool that automatically transforms YouTube videos into podcasts, podcasts into blogs, and blogs into social media posts. 🤯