🚀 TikTok Strategy & What's Trending 9/29/23

Hello Fellow TikTokers 🚀

Here are some things I’ve noticed are trending and working:

1. Carousel posts like this one, this one, and this one. You’ll see a lot of these and I think what the posts that do well have in common is they invoke a lot of curiosity on the first image, and have a great last image that’s sharable. This is an easy way to create simple content specific to your niche and fingers crossed one of these works for you (let me know if it does!!).

2. “The Art of Noticing” posts like this one & this one. Just a cool video format. Def use the #artofnoticing hashtag if you make one of these.

Here’s how I’ve been finding trends & inspiration:

Trends

Optimizing my for-you page by only following and engaging with content that’s related to what I want to post about (doesn’t have to be super niche-specific, but make sure content or channel whose videos you would admire for inspiration).

Note - this isn’t a must-do, it’s just what’s helped me.

Inspiration

Because I’m in the mental health space, I search “mental health” on tiktok, and filter by “like count & this month.” Sometimes instead of this month I filter by “three months.” I’ll look at videos that have done well and save the ones I like or that I think I could recreate in a similar fashion with my own twist.

I’ll also do the same filtered search but for words like anxiety, loneliness, relief, and other keywords related to the videos I’m posting about.

Current Strategy

The video I had that went viral this week is now sitting pretty at over 3.7 million views. What a game-changer this has been for my account. This is 100% possible for you as well.

What I’d been doing to get to this first viral video:

1. Follow the above two steps for finding inspiration and trends.

2. Creating similar videos to the successful videos I saw. I was making my videos the same length, with the same style of text on-screen, and the same sounds (if they were still relevant).

3. In order to make this not take forever, I’d sit down for a few hours one day and make 6 videos in the same format, then another six in a different format the next day.

4. Reaching out to people in my niche on TikTok or “growth gurus” on TikTok and dming them asking if they would give feedback on my videos. You’d be surprised, a lot of people want to help other creators grow.

5. Avoid making talking videos. Initially, I started uploading videos of me talking to the camera about mental health topics. This didn’t really work. Here’s why: when you’re starting out and don’t have a following, how are people going to find you credible? If you make shorter videos, with immediate value from text-on-screen, in a format that will signal high watch time to the algorithm, you’re good to go. This is why I started posting shorter videos of me doing random things like eating (lol) with text on the screen.

Note - this is my strategy and I’m open to feedback. Please feel free to reply to this email and share what’s been working best for you.

Now What?

Now that I’ve had a video go viral, I’m still following the above steps, and also capitalizing on this viral video by creating similar videos in the exact same format. Same length, same text, sound, etc. I’m experimenting with variables such as different backgrounds, and sometimes different sounds.

This is advice I heard from several big creators - when you find something that works - double down on it and continue making content in the same style.

Cheers to growing on TikTok! If this was helpful for you, I’d really appreciate you sharing with a friend. Feel free to reply or comment with any questions.