tiktok algo 102

2024 SAM DISCLOSURE:

I'll be honest, I wrote all this down back in 2021-2022 and the algorithm has changed several times over. 

This will honestly not really help you all that much in the long run, but it might serve as an excellent example of how terminally online I am.

I’m someone who fundamentally believes in following the audience. I’m also someone built through a constant string of failures. A lifetime of failures, one might say. More failures in one year than some have had in their whole life. I’m not sure how this will help the “ethos” of this paper- but hear me out. In the real world, there’s a tried and true phrase called “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. While this is good advice in some places, in social media this is a death sentence. If it ain’t broke today it most certainly will tomorrow. As audiences and trends are everchanging, it’s key to stay on top of these trends so you’re never out of the loop. For context: I posted on YouTube for multiple years to a varying amount of success. In 2018 my videos had a max view count of 300,000 and a minimum view count of 10,000. In audience terms, my ceiling was 300,000 but my floor was 10,000. This would drop as the years went by and soon my ceiling was 10,000 and my floor was 500. I looked around to see where those views were going and came to realize they hadn’t gone to a different channel, they went to a different platform. I made the jump to TikTok and within three months, I had videos regularly performing in the 10,000s with a number of them reaching the 100,000s. Content creation is always an uphill climb, but I’ve picked up a few tricks along the way to help this climb become as easy as possible.


Without further ado:

Importance of TikTok

Above is a chart showing how the “average monthly time per user” state in the United States for TikTok has surpassed YouTube 24 hours to 22 hours and 40 minutes.


While this might not seem like anything special, this means that within six months, TikTok’s monthly average went from 15 hours to 24 hours. In the time since then, as YouTube’s average began to fall, TikTok’s remained stable. There’s a good reason for this, and it goes back quite some time. Since the dawn of time, the average attention of a goldfish has been nine seconds. Must be nice but I couldn't relate, for us humans this time span has been decreasing over time. In a flex for humanity: the average attention span has gone from 12 seconds in 2000 to below 8 seconds in 2021. 


FUN NOTE:

A study from Edison showed that our attention spans may be getting shorter, but content that is highly relevant or entertaining will always hold its audience. 93% of podcast listeners, for example, stay tuned for “all, or the majority” of each episode, displaying the medium’s ability to hold attention.


Similar to how users of the average web page will read at most 20% of the words and how the average page visit lasts less than a minute, marketers are having a tough time advertising to people who couldn’t care enough to watch a two-minute video or read an article.


Terrible for humanity but great for TikTok and, by extension, great for me. Audiences are flocking to TikTok, and this makes sense when you think about the science that goes behind shorter content. In a study published by Neuro-Insight, TikTok stood out from other platforms on two key dimensions of consumers' neuro response: 

TikTok thrives off relevance (its approach) and engagement.

It promotes it with its algorithm and in return rewards users who can provide that back. The best of this is the first part: relevance.


What is relevance?

Already existing trends.


The key to succeeding on TikTok (in whatever way you might view success) is by simply following what’s popular. And TikTok makes this very easy. Before we discuss this, let’s dispel a funny little meme:

Best Posting Times


You might sometimes see a chart like this when you look up “best time to post on TikTok”:

…and on the flipside, you might also see websites thirsty for clicks posts things like:

In reality, this is just bullshit. Especially the second chart, which just took the best posting times and realized there are more hours in a day than three.


While you could in theory post at 2:00 am and your video magically does well (does happen), the more realistic outcome is your video underperforming because most of your audience is asleep. In reality, the algorithm is mostly random. There’s kinda a magic way to finesse it, but it’s more complicated than the charts above.


See, the main point is that it’s important to understand who your audience is and when they’re the most active. TikTok itself provides you with a deeper look at your analytics once you get to a certain point, so for an example, here’s what my best posting times looked like this past week:

I have them swapped on purpose but from left to right, 

here’s my audience activity on January 13th (THURSDAY) and January 12th (WEDNESDAY) 


As we can see from this chart, my best time on Thursday was 9:00 pm. 

BUT my best time on Wednesday was 7:00 pm with a sharp cutoff after. 


In reality, I base my posting around the assumed age range of my followers. TikTok has viewers of all ages, but in my particular case, the audience I tend to reach is Gen Z. This one’s because I’m technically in Gen Z statistically speaking, BUT my humor is 100% Gen Z. As a result, when the algorithm looks for people to push my content to, it goes to people with similar humor (algorithm checks this by the videos you like, share, etc.).

Similar to how a millennial with, I don’t know The Office references or something, would attract millennial users, I attract Gen Z. Niches attract niches, and an age range is definitely a “niche” of sorts for an algorithm. With that in mind, I’ve had typical luck with a specific method, but it’s not set in stone and obviously must be built towards:



With this pseudo-science out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the matter: what makes the algorithm tick? While that’s mostly still unknown, the most comprehensive understanding was recently leaked to The New York Times in a document titled “TikTok Algo 101” with direct proof of what factors the algorithm uses.


The main squeeze you need to know is there are six main factors that affect the algorithm:

1. Hashtags

2. Trending Sounds

3. Captions

4. Posting Time

5. The Right Video Content

6. Location



Hashtags

In an effort to get videos on the For You page (the main page videos are shown to others), most people including myself will put hashtags like: 

I tend to do this for fun, but in reality, TikTok has gone on record to say these hashtags don’t guarantee you a spot on the For You page. In fact, any #xyz or #fyp hashtag actually doesn’t do anything for the algorithm, they are just normal hashtags. In the beginning, they probably did! But nowadays it's better to be more practical.


If you really want to game the system, you’ve gotta do a little digging.

There’s something called the Discover tab.


This tab has all the trending and branded hashtags that are popular that day. This is everchanging, but a key to finding these “trending” or “branded” hashtags are the logos next to them

While a normal hashtag will have a grey clock [formerly used by that user], a branded hashtag will have a blue checkmark [corporate approved] and a trending hashtag will have a flame [popular wildfire i guess].

 

In this example above:

 

It’s best to use a good plethora of hashtags when you post a video, but the key is to be more diverse in the type you use. Like that “cast a wide net” phrase some guy on the Metro told me as love advice, it’s best to spread yourself thin in this department.

Ideally, you should strive to use a combo of:

 

EXAMPLE:

If you posted a video about surfing, you would definitely want to use #surfing.

Maybe you really really like surfing, so maybe you also use a hashtag like #surflife where there are 361.9 million views attached to it compared to #surfing that has 3.5 billion views. 

Maybe went surfing in California. So you also should use #venicebeach or #malibu or some California beach. 

Finally with whatever space you might have left, go ahead and put down some viral hashtags from the Discover page.


Have no shame and go all out with how many you use, I sometimes do my descriptions as a single letter and the rest is hashtags. Why not.


Trending Sounds

Another big aspect of the algorithm is using the right sound and song. This is a tough one.

Some videos work fine with their own unique sound, but this is leaving luck to the algorithm. In an effort to wing the best performance, you might need to start stalking big users and see what sounds they’re using. Even if they used it earlier in the week, that’s usually a good indicator of what is popular or getting popular. 


Some trending sounds take TikTok by storm and you find it naturally, but if not here’s a few other options:

Trending sounds is really trial and error. Tokboard is your best bet, but the alternative method here is through going through TikTok enough to know trending sounds and be able to find them.

 

Captions

The bread-and-butter clickbait of TikTok: captions.

 

Captions are the text you can put over the thumbnail of your video and they are essential. As mentioned before, the average attention span of a person is shorter than the dust bunny I keep as a pet in the corner of my apartment. As such, a good caption should be one that grabs a viewer’s attention and encourages engagement. Things like:

And I’ll even provide a personal example here. I did a video where I tracked down the West 4 Street puncher in NYC (we didn’t find her but the effort was there) so for my caption I put:

This helped my video because it explained what it was before someone clicked it. I’m still working on my captions, but I’ve noticed successful ones lay the stakes of what a video is:

There should be something exciting or interesting to a caption, so something like “trouble on west 4” would probably not do that well because there’s nothing that eye-popping about it. 

 

While that video in particular did well, I also have no shame so I’ll just openly admit my failures and why they happen, here’s a case of when my caption did NOT WORK:

These two videos are the exact same, HOWEVER the problem was my thumbnail. 

The one on the right was my first time posting it. I had a random billboard for the thumbnail and a caption with a bunch of awkward space that made the text hard to read. 

On top of that, I basically had my caption framed as just “me surviving in NYC with no shelter”. Who cares about me? That’s not interesting, what IS interesting to your average TikTok user is how something relates to THEM.

 

As established before, I lack shame, so I 100% privatized the video, whipped together a few new ones which I posted on intervals of 2-3 days, and then posted the same exact video a week later. The one on the left was that end result, which a more exciting thumbnail and a caption that frames it as “how YOU can survive NYC with no shelter”

The video performed better because it had a more eye-catching thumbnail and caption.


Posting Time

I’m gonna copy/paste my section about the TikTok analytics but essentially follow that advice and you’ll be golden here. Keep in mind: 85% of the time videos don’t blow up immediately, but rather slowly build up likes and engagement and THEN go viral.


Anyways my copy/paste:

See, the main point is that it’s important to understand who your audience is and when they’re the most active. TikTok itself provides you with a deeper look at your analytics once you get to a certain point, so for an example, here’s what my best posting times looked like this past week:

I have them swapped on purpose but from left to right, 

here’s my audience activity on January 13th (THURSDAY) and January 12th (WEDNESDAY) 


As we can see from this chart, my best time on Thursday was 9:00 pm. 

BUT my best time on Wednesday was 7:00 pm with a sharp cutoff after. 


In reality, I base my posting around the assumed age range of my followers. TikTok has viewers of all ages, but in my particular case, the audience I tend to reach is Gen Z. This one’s because I’m technically in Gen Z statistically speaking, BUT my humor is 100% Gen Z. As a result, when the algorithm looks for people to push my content to, it goes to people with similar humor (algorithm checks this by the videos you like, share, etc.).


-POINT TO TAKE FROM THIS AS YOU SCROLL PAST-


I know you skipped over that, but validly as I just copy/pasted my work from a few pages ago.

The key takeaway from that is:

The Right Video Content

This one is important (and one I have to work on myself).

One factor in content ranks better on the algorithm: looping seamlessly.


If a video is edited to loop easily, the chance of viewers watching it over and over again is higher which makes your video more likely to be picked up by the TikTok algorithm. Short content that is repeatable is a recipe for success on TikTok.


The optimal length of a TikTok video is roughly 16 seconds.

In these three examples,

while the total play time might

be significant, the issue I run into

is my “watched full time” statistic.

To TikTok, this is a huge indicator of

a video’s success, and as you can see, these three videos have average watch times of:


All well below the length of my

videos (roughly 45-55 seconds each)

Strive for content around the

18 second mark (or shorter as

most trends are) to keep the

“watched full video” statistic high.

Try in your edit to make it as engaging as possible, and this could include anything from:

Location

[AUTHOR’S NOTE- this one could be off but this is my personal take]

Location is a big influence on a video’s success and or failure. While some say that location is less relevant once you engage with more content and more specific niches, I feel location still does cap your knees to some extent. TikTok and a lot of advertisers tout how great TikTok is for local marketing because TikTok primarily promotes your videos to a nearby audience, but this is exactly my problem.


Depending on what your niche is, this could be a benefit. For example, if your niche is political, D.C. isn’t a bad place to have as your base algorithm since it’s overly political. D.C.’s not as great for my niche as Florida or New York City would, but for political content it’s not bad.


I work around this by having friends who live in the places I post about immediately share it with their friends in that city so my video gets more promotion in THAT CITY’S algorithm.




Those are the six main factors behind the algorithm, but ultimately there’s a plethora of different reasons why videos succeed or don’t. Ultimately to some extent, it’s quantity over quality and the more you post the better you’ll get at making TikToks and developing your niche. Once you find a niche, stay in it. Your niche of being members of Congress already puts you ahead there.



Other Various Factors and Random Tidbits





Final Thoughts

This should cover most ground when it comes to what makes the algorithm tick. There’s plenty to still cover that I’ll definitely expand into, such as shadowbans and how that affects a user’s algorithm standing, but for starting out this should definitely be more than enough. I’m a big believer in winging it and am certain of absolutely nothing in life, so there’s no reason to me why your TikTok can’t have 100,000 followers within the next year.


Hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions!

-Sam Gordon

sambg4200@gmail.com