Tranium’s TikTok

By James Mackay (@jamesmacuow)

For the past year I have been working alongside a content creator under the name Tranium as his video editor (and help with some channel manager ordeals as well) and for a while we’ve been looking for ways to grow his YouTube channel and when this BCM206 project came up I had the idea of building up his TikTok and try reaching out to a new type of audience to hopefully bring over to the YouTube channel and overall boost the channel because as we know…

“Bigger Number means Better Person”

For those that don’t know what TikTok is, it is a short-form video sharing app that allow users to create and share 15 second all the way up to 3 minute videos on any topic they like. The way TikTok’s user interface is designed makes it really easy for users to spend hours upon hours on the app. Their video creation functions are just as easy to understand that many users (even people above 70yrs of age, where they don’t have the greatest grasp on technology) find themselves being able to make some of their best content just from inside the app. The biggest thing that caught eyes of big influencers and why so many people have moved so much of their content to TikTok as well as having it on YouTube is because of TikTok’s algorithm. The algorithm TikTok has implemented tracks what you have watched, checked if you’ve interacted with that longer than other genres and then immediately feeds what you’ve shown to enjoy, overtime building its own profile of what they think you like essentially keep your attention on the app for many hours.

Tranium already had a TikTok account from back in 2019 but really only posted once or twice as he didn’t really enjoy the platform’s start and as well as TikTok really wasn’t built for his content at the time. TikTok at that stage was for either dancing videos or cringy “In Real Life” occurrences, YouTubers weren’t really utilizing it as much.

So the plan at first was to just move a funny clip (no matter the length) from his YouTube content over from his YouTube channel everytime he uploaded to reach a new adudince hoping to attract them to the YouTube channel. At first we pulled some decent views seeing as we never publiclly said we were uploading to TikTok again but they began to stagnate, so I talked to a friend of mine who was very knowledgable in TikTok and undestanding who to build audiences quickly on TikTok and he gave me some tips that I used hoping it would build up the TikTok account in some way.

I have said in a previous blog post that,

“TikTok is a powerhouse… it’s potential for creator growth is phenomenal” and whilst working on this project, I have seen that so much more clearly.

What we did was we started posting shorter clips because our overall retention percentage was garbage and was also informed that TikTok is known to promote shorter clips on their “For You Page” (which where most people build their views, its kind of like a trending tab) and so that’s what we did, at first we were uploading 40-70 second TikToks and completely cut the new TikToks down to nothing above 30 seconds and saw immediate growth in the analytics

Another tactic we were told to follow was to interact with the comments more and that will help boost us in the algorithm and we noticed that once we started liking and talking back to the comments more people wanted to interact with the posts, which obviously makes perfect sense but to us it was revolutionary, we sometimes forget that we are making some people’s favourite content and they look forward every day for a video of some sort even though we are just regular people.

And the final hurdle that I figured out was that “For You Pages” were geographical, meaning I was uploading TikToks to Australia and not really reaching other countries which was not good because Tranium’s main fanbase was American, Canadian and British so the content wasn’t reaching those regions so my counter to this problem was to install a VPN to spoof my location to Texas and upload at a good time then (most of the time it correlated with the same time the video for that clip was uploaded) hopefully in return we see an increase in views and followers which we did. Ever since the TikToks have been uploaded with a VPN we’ve seen an increase in views from many different countries and followers too

Over the lifetime of this project we went from just over 3.4k followers and built that up to 4.1k followers in under 3 months which I would say is a success, so much so that we are going to keep this going for as long as we can. We’ve notcied recently that YouTube culture is at a low and “Reaction style” content seems to do really well on not only YouTube but it is also some of our more popular uploads on the TikTok so until we find (or create) the next thing to do we plan on uploading reactions to TikTok a lot more and hopefully reach 5k followers sometime soon.

Over this whole time we’ve never publicly said on any of his other platforms that we are building up the TikTok on purpose, we wanted to naturally obtain new viewers or organically reach existing followers of Tranium and see what we could grow to over this time frame, if a project like this comes around again I reckon we’ll go about promoting the TikTok and see what comes from it.