For this project, I went along and decided to make a help make and grow a TikTok account for a YouTuber by the name of Tranium who I work with as his YouTube editor. I came to him with this idea and he was all for it because he doesn’t use TikTok personally but wanted a way to bring in new audiences so this seemed like the perfect way to do so.
We decided we’d just use our YouTube content as the content for TikTok and see where we go from there.
From there we had some slow growth, but I want to “play the game” and REALLY try grow, so I went to a mate of mine who is a “TikTok Specialist” who has helped many gaming creators blow up on TikTok and he told me some tips to help gain more followers and viewers. We implemented a few of them and saw some instant growth.
He told me that the secret is to make shorter videos (somewhere between 15-29 seconds) that way your retention rate is higher and then you’re more likely to end up on the “For You Page”.
So far we haven’t seen a video blow up yet but the time will come, we had a video reach 5 times the normal amount of interactions which helped us boost our interactions.
Some hurdles that I came across whilst uploading to this account were that I found out that TikTok has a region-based algorithm, meaning that if I was to upload in Australia mainly Australians would see it which isn’t good for Tranium because his main YouTube fanbase is American which means we aren’t as likely to reach his current fans on TikTok who don’t already know he has an account. I’ve had to respond to some comments asking if it was a real account because they didn’t know if Tranium really had a TikTok or not. So in order to combat this I had to go and get a VPN to spoof my location to that I can reach the American audience and seemed to have worked so far.
Another instance that hurt the TikTok for a moment was that we had a video go up on YouTube that ended up giving us a strike on the channel, which in return means we couldn’t upload on YouTube for a week which then hurts the TikTok.
On YouTube we upload every 3 days, so missed out on a potential of 3 new TikToks that were going to go up but ended up having to be delayed so that they can correspond with the YouTube video that was uploaded the same day
Upon all that practical work, there has also been some behind the scene research that I have done, understanding YouTube algorithms, TikTok and how it works, understanding human attention span in social media and many more and upon researching these topics I know have a greater understanding of what I am doing and hopefully can hit 4k followers by the end of the semester
James Mackay - Portfolio 