Pat 0:00 

Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. In today’s episode, Dan and Lloyd discuss the five lessons they’ve learned on the road to becoming viral on Tiktok.

Dan 0:09 

We’ve helped our clients and ourselves go viral, inverted commas on TikTok a number of times and I thought, let’s do an episode where we share the stuff we’ve learnt.

Pat 0:19 

Lloyd shares his mental hack for becoming more confident in front of the camera.

Lloyd 0:23 

Just be yourself and be a human. Yeah, for years, I was just pretending to be someone else.

Dan 0:29 

So there you have it. Try and follow these five tips before you post on TikTok and watch your account skyrocket into social media stardom.

Right, let’s get stuck in, this is episode 101 of the business anchors podcast.

Lloyd 0:43 

So, what lessons have we learned from going viral on TikTok Dan?

Dan 0:59 

We’ve learned some very important lessons that we’re going to be talking through in this episode Lloyd.

Lloyd 1:05 

Good, bit cringy that we’re saying going viral?

Dan 1:08 

Well, to be honest, with my marketing hat on it’s more of a hook to get people to listen to the episode. I know it sounds a bit cringy saying viral…

Lloyd 1:17 

by ‘viral’ what we mean is loads of people are seeing stuff we are doing

Dan 1:20 

Just to give a backstory, so we work with brands to support them grow their TikTok and produce content for TikTok and we’ve got our own TikTok channels.

We’ve helped our clients and ourselves go ‘viral’ on TikTok a number of times and I thought, let’s do an episode where we share the stuff we’ve learned.

Lloyd 1:41 

If you’re listening to this thinking, Lloyd and Dan keep talking about TikTok, and I don’t want to use TikTok, why are they doing that? I’ve got some stats to back this up Dan. Why might it be important for us to be talking about Tik Tok?

Dan 1:53 

Love me some Tik Tok stats, give us your stats Lloyd!

Lloyd 1:55 

So, I just want to point out this is where people are spending their time. So, it makes sense for anyone that needs to get the attention of humans to at least consider or get to know TikTok, TikTok is a platform if you don’t know already. So, monthly active users Dan…

Dan 2:11 

Yeah, go on..

Lloyd 2:12 

So, TikTok has got 1 billion!

Dan 2:15 

Mental

Lloyd 2:17 

Instagram, it’s still not up there with Instagram that’s got almost 1.5 billion but, Twitter’s only got 436 million, so less than half. LinkedIn only got 200 million, about a fifth of the monthly users. So, if you’re thinking it’s a no-brainer to be on Twitter and to be on LinkedIn, but you think TikTok’s a stupid thing to consider. Those numbers kind of show you how many people you could be reaching and also something I found really interesting.

This data is from the end of 2021. So yeah, a few months out of date, but I think things will be similar. You’ve got YouTube, 19 minutes a day on average. Instagram, 29 minutes. Snapchat, 31 minutes and LinkedIn, I found this one really interesting, it is one minute.

Dan 3:10 

The average time he spends on the platform is one minute a day. I’m sure that’s not right.

Lloyd 3:14 

I think loads of users don’t really use it much and TikTok has the highest out of all of them at 33 minutes. So again, it’s got loads of users, and the users of the platform use it more than other users.

Dan 3:32 

Also, history leaves clues. Like, if you think about when people are saying “oh, you should use Insta” when Instagram used to be a place to just show photos of your dinner years ago and marketers were saying “you should use Instagram for your business” yeah, yeah, whatever. Now, look at it. Yeah, it’s at that stage now.

Lloyd 3:56 

It’s funny how obvious it is, isn’t it? Because things just repeat themselves. But then, they go na, won’t be like that for TikTok, honestly, just for kids.

Oh, what was Instagram like? Cool, Okay. Yeah, like Facebook was? Yeah and now Facebook is for your nan. So, one day TikTok will be for your nan, clip that, when I’m old, retired, and probably some really cool influencer. I’m going to show this video. Smile at the cool old people.

Dan 4:26 

Nice.

Lloyd 4:28 

So, yeah, I just wanted to back up because we’ve been talking about TikTok a lot. And I thought some people might be like, oh, yeah, they talk about that.

Because you need to start listening. That’s why, all right?

Dan 4:35 

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned after going viral on Tiktok is one, consistency and two, testing. They’re the two biggest things that I’ve learned in terms of having success on TikTok.

To give you some stats from my personal TikTok to give you an idea, I posted 78 TikTok’s before getting a TikTok that was In the 10s of 1000s of views so, the first 78 were a few 100 Here, a few 100 there, then I started to get into 10s of 1000s of views.

It took 88 TikTok’s to get in the hundreds of 1000s of views. Throughout that whole journey, I’ve been trying and testing lots of different styles of TikTok, rather than doing the same thing over and over again. So for example, clips from this podcast like this, like you’re probably watching now on TikTok, tapping into trends, so looking at trending sounds and creating TikToks with a copy over that trending sound, you’re acting out a relatable situation that your audience will relate to, behind the scenes content, TikTok’s of doing a day-in-the-life of our agency and a whole range of things.

So, if you want to conquer TikTok from my journey of using it, the important things are to be consistent and to try and test lots of different things because eventually one thing is gonna work and then you can keep doing it.

Lloyd 6:00 

Think how many people would have given up before 88 when you’ve got your first TikTok with over 100,000 views. Like, I would assume 99% of people would give up and think now this isn’t going to happen.

So, I think it’s so important that we are consistent and testing new things, trying new things is something outside of TikTok and outside of our marketing that we’re doing with the rest of our business as well. We have just started implementing, even for our weekly meeting where we have all of our team in one place. Once a week, we now have time where we talk about what we tried that’s new this week, and how’s it gone? So I think that’s just a really good thing for businesses, even outside of using TikRok and outside of marketing, trying new things all the time. So, if you try new things every week, that’s 52 new things to try. There’s gonna be seven of them that are amazing and two of them will completely change your business. So do it for next year.

Dan 6:57 

Yeah, I totally agree. The second biggest thing I’ve learned on my TikTok journey is that people on TikTok are nasty.

Lloyd 7:05 

Yes, I’ve got a bone to pick with you TikTok.

My brother might have rubbish hair and he might not know what he’s talking about. I can say that because I’m his brother but if any of you like to keep saying that on TikTok, I will find you

Dan 7:20 

And my tight jeans, you were nasty about my tight jeans.

Lloyd 7:23 

I will find you, I will quietly agree with you and I will kill you. Alright? I can talk about its rubbish hair but, TikTok you need to tone it down a bit.

Dan 7:30 

This is one of those platforms though. Like on LinkedIn. I’ve got hundreds of 1000s of views. Very few nasty comments. TikTok is the first platform where you actually get a video that pops, the amount of like, brutally direct nasty comments is not very nice.

Lloyd 7:47 

You might notice he’s wearing a hat. He wasn’t last time, was he? you told him he had rubbish hair. You told him that he had rubbish tight trousers which are both valid, but you’ve made him change now.

Dan 8:00 

I don’t even listen to what they say on TikTok. I’m not even bothered by it. I’m not even wearing a hat or not tight yet anymore.

Lloyd 8:05 

I don’t care. I’ve got thick skin as well and in fact, under that skin, you can’t even get to me, can’t get to my heart. Which is struggling.

Dan 8:11 

Yeah, so that was one of my biggest lessons TikTok people but, to be fair there were a lot of positive comments as well but, there are more negative. So be nice on TikTok.

Lloyd 8:22 

Yeah, like this, get us millions of views just to prove that you are nice.

Dan 8:30 

Yeah. So, the third big lesson from my TikTok journey.

Lloyd 8:35 

Can we go back? Sorry, I was just gonna ask, why do you think that on TikTok the comments are more nasty in general?

Dan 8:35 

I think because it’s not so connected with your actual profile, like, for example, LinkedIn. So on LinkedIn, you can very clearly see who someone is, the company they work for, their contact information and all of that stuff. So if they say, my hair shit, that’s public for example, I’ll tell you a quick story.

This week on LinkedIn there was a woman called Leah who did a post about having tattoos at work, right? This is actually a thing and it went viral. Someone sent her a message, a really nasty message on LinkedIn saying how shit her tattoos were and like they’re awful and they look horrible. You can see that person works for I think it’s TFL, London, she literally screenshots it and tweeted them and posted on LinkedIn saying “Hey, Dave Smith” that’s not his name, but whoever you like and tagged them and said, “Is this one of your employees look at the way he’s behaving?” He’s probably going to get sacked.

Lloyd 9:43 

Because he’s just sending horrible messages to women on the internet.

Dan 9:48 

Whereas, people on TikTok you can just easily sign up. You don’t have to connect it to your business.

Lloyd 9:54 

I completely agree, it’s similar to Twitter actually. If you think back in the day with Facebook, Facebook used to be until people realised that just setting up a second account with like a wolf as a picture or something but, it used to be like it has all your friends on there and all your photos of your life and stuff. So I think people wouldn’t do it. LinkedIn, like I said, it’s your job and everything. Whereas TikTok on Twitter, it’s kind of like, you just got a small picture. You can have a bio if you want, like you say it’s quite removed from the actual person.

Also, I think with the algorithm with TikTok, I see TikTok from all around the world. I kind of feel like, again, you feel removed from reality? you think “Oh well, if I’m in the UK, oh, that guy in the Philippines isn’t going to ever do anything If I say something nasty about him”

Dan 10:43 

This is the power of TikTok and why it’s so different as well. The ‘for you’ page is so different to anything we’ve seen before. We’re used to the news feed, where the algorithm will serve people who are in your ecosystem, like your colleagues, friends or colleague’s connections will maybe show them content, on TikTok, its algorithm is so crazy that your content can be shown to people around the world and it can blow up, like in a bigger way.

Lloyd 11:12 

So that distance from reality and your offline world is bigger than say Facebook or LinkedIn, anything like that, where you might think twice about making nasty comments or being horrible, because it might affect your actual life. I just say just be nice. Be kind.

Dan 11:29 

Be kind.

Another one of the big lessons I’ve learned on my TikTok journey is that different types of content work for different accounts. You’ll see people like me and other people on TikTok who are sharing content like this, where they’re saying “you should tap into trends” or “you should do this” and “you should do it behind the scenes thing” or “you should repurpose content” but different things work for different people.

There’s no silver bullet and one answer for you. Take all the advice you hear on here and on social media with a pinch of salt. I’ll give you an example. So traditionally, we found original content made for TikTok has worked best compared to repurposing other content. Whereas we did a piece of research recently for a project and we found that for a company, the TikToks that were repurposing TV shows, and put them on Tik Tok were performing much better than original content they’d be it’s just been shot in the app, which was really confusing, because traditionally you think, Oh, it needs to be native and built for the platform.

Lloyd 12:33 

That’s what we’ve seen and you hear those people saying, No, you got to use the platform, and don’t just take something like a high production piece of content from somewhere else and put it on there. We did the research into something to do with the TV that we probably can’t mention, but a really big account was getting millions or hundreds of 1000s of views on every piece of content. It was clear that the high production of stuff taken from TV was outperforming the native content.

Dan 13:04 

Our data nerd over here categorized their TikToks into different categories to figure out how all the different categories of content were performing and the ones with less editing that had just been repurposed and slightly tweaked for TikTok, we’re performing much better than the original content was produced, so again, that’s not the same for everyone. This is why it’s important to try and test.

Lloyd 13:27 

Basically, try and test different things and do your own research. Don’t just listen to what marketing experts like us say on the internet.

Dan 13:34 

Yeah, either way, it’s fine. Another lesson I’ve learned from TikTok which is off the back of the recent video I did that went viral is to follow accounts like Trend Bible that will alert you of trends happening on TikTok. That’s one of the ways that I’ve managed to start to get more views and get more engagement is to tap into trending sounds stuff that these accounts like the trend bible are telling you to tap into. They literally wait for sounds to start blowing up and then do a TikTok telling you what to do and it’s been really helpful.

Lloyd 14:11 

Yeah. Nice. What’s the next one then?

Dan 14:18 

Another thing I’ve kind of learned here on TikTok is to actually be human and talk to the audience like we’re human. I know this sounds fluffy, like being human but, when you’re scrolling through TikTok, it’s noticeable when people are naturally talking to you and not performing. I think this isn’t an easy thing to do.

I followed a guy and one of the tips he shared which completely blew my mind was to speak to the camera as if you’re speaking to one of your mates, rather than thinking there’s like potentially 1000s of people behind that. If you just think when you’re looking at the lens, I’m speaking to one of my mates, it makes a huge difference in the way you deliver your ideas and that you communicate to an audience.

Lloyd 15:08 

What are you doing tonight? Watching football?

Dan 15:14 

You’re kind of getting it Lloyd. Like you’re, you’re almost there.

Lloyd 15:21 

Yeah. I’m concerned my wife’s gonna leave me. Like that?

I’m only joking, obviously I’m not concerned. Do I need to be Sarah?

We’re going back to the stuff that makes sense. This is a classic, isn’t it with every social platform? “Oh, how can we hack this?” and “How can we be better on this social media platform?” and then it’s just like, just be a human rather than acting like a robot? In the end, in the long term, that’s what works, rather than trying to hack things and think of ways of how we can trick this platform into thinking that we’re going to be something that we’re not or pretending to be someone you’re not. Just be yourself and be a human, and it usually works out best.

Dan 16:09 

Building your confidence on camera takes time, it’s like training any kind of muscle, you need to keep doing this kind of thing to feel natural. When we started out. Looking back at some of our videos, it is awful to watch, because it looks like we’re doing a performance to the camera. It’s like “Hello, Lloyd. How are you?”

Lloyd 16:27 

I’m Okay, How are you?

Dan 16:29 

I’m very well, Thank you.

Lloyd 16:31 

Let’s talk about marketing today!

Dan 16:32 

Yeah, exactly. Whereas when you do this, and you really know the topic you’re speaking about, and you’ve made 1000s and 1000s of videos. Eventually, you get to a point where you don’t think about your delivery, you just think oh, I want to share this idea and my thoughts and it comes across much more naturally rather than robotic and shit.

Lloyd 16:50 

For years, I was just pretending to be someone else. I finally realised if I am myself and just talk like me, some people won’t like it, but those people wouldn’t like me or want to work with me anyway. So it makes sense to be me and put off most people. Hopefully, some people want to work with me.

Dan 17:08 

I remember back to a time when we were working from our parent’s spare room where we were trying to make a video and it was like Lloyd’s first time on camera. I remember in the back room, in the spare room, we went through so many takes, it took about eight hours to film and it was a five-minute thing.

Lloyd 17:24 

Because every sentence I had to say perfectly and I had to say 12 sentences in a row.

So, if I didn’t get the 11th one, right, I’d start again. Then I fluffed my lines, and I’d start again. And I get incredibly sweaty and flustered.

Dan 17:38 

You’d literally speak like that like you’re doing a performance.

Lloyd 17:41 

Yeah, I forgot my line then. So we’ll have to start again. Hi.

Dan 17:46 

Shall I try and say some useful stuff?

Lloyd 17:53 

Yes, no, no, definitely. Otherwise, we’ll lose all the listeners.

Dan 17:55 

So, one final thing I’ve learned from TikTok is quite a scary thing actually, that when you have a video that goes a bit viral and you start to get lots of engagement it makes being on TikTok more addictive.

You chase that dopamine hit and I found myself spending more time on TikTok trying to think of all TikTok ideas to create another video that’s going to get lots of views and attention which isn’t a good thing I don’t think. They got me yeah, I’m here now, I’m stuck “Help!”

Lloyd 18:00 

Get home tonight. Get in the garden, grow some veg, and have a good night’s sleep. Okay, and you can get away from the social media demons. All right?

Dan 18:38 

Thank you. So hopefully these Tiktok tips have been useful. We’re gonna continue to share what we’re learning whilst running our Social Media Marketing Agency. Have you got anything else good to add Lloyd?

Lloyd 18:54 

If you guys don’t start using TikTok for your business. We’ll just keep talking about it. So come on, use it this time. This is the last time we’re going to ask you, all right?

Is this podcast sponsored by anyone Dan?

Dan 19:08 

This podcast is sponsored by Adobe Express. If you want to try Adobe Express, then clicking the link in the description is a really cool tool and you’re gonna have fun with it.

Lloyd 19:21 

See you in your ears next week, guys.

Hopefully, you’ve learnt a lot about how to go viral on TikTok. If you have any more questions, then why not start a conversation with us here at Knowlton.