Link to the TikTok I talk about: https://www.tiktok.com/@traniumyoutube?lang=en
These past 3 or so months I have be on a journey to see how easy it could be to build an audience on a platform never been utilised before in previous content. Tranium is a YouTuber I have been working with for the past year now and we were having a meeting talking about what the next big thing could be and how we are going to grow the channel, I then proposed we try out using TikTok to try and pull in the viewers and build up a new audience.
What I then had to do was think about what is the audience we are trying to build here because TikTok has so many different communities, which one are we trying to “plop” ourselves into. Over the past year Tranium and I have made many different variations of content from Vlogs to gaming to reactions, we even done a science show before (but we don’t talk about that one 😬)
From all those video I realised what genre we fit into, we can put ourselves into the “meme lords” category. The people who enjoy reddit meme style humour are the type of people who enjoy Tranium’s content, edgier teens (from about 15-19, although we do know there are some 30yr olds that are consistent viewers).
When considering all this I also had another thing to think about, which was how was I going to build this TikTok back up, Tranium hadn’t touched it in years so I had the ability to try grab a new and/or similar audience to pull in and hopefully become a fan of Tranium and the content we make.
Now, 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.
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 every time he uploaded to reach a new audience hoping to attract them to the YouTube channel. At first we pulled some decent views seeing as we never publicly said we were uploading to TikTok again but they began to stagnate, so I talked to a friend of mine who was very knowledgeable in TikTok and understanding 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.
Since doing this project, I have realised what new genre of people we are attempting to pull in, and those people are the ones that enjoy reaction content. Reaction content is the biggest thing on YouTube right now and we figured since that’s what we are doing on YouTube why not bring that to TikTok and we’ve seen success. Our most popular TikToks are Reaction and “Memey” style videos and that’s the audience we’ve seemed to pull in.
(The Picture besides is a representation of the last TikToks that did well that were some what reaction based content )
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.
Resources I’ve used throughout the Project:
Creator Inside: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGg-UqjRgzhYDPJMr-9HXCg (Helps understand YouTube, audience retention, click-through rate and all that analytic information)
TikTok Algorithm: https://blog.hootsuite.com/tiktok-algorithm/
Bennett, Lucy, Chin, Bertha and Jones, 2016. “Between Ethics, Privacy, Fandom, and Social Media: New Trajectories that Challenge Media Producer/Fan Relations”
Merriam, Sharan B. and Tisdell, Elizabeth J. (2016) “Being a Careful Observer, in Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation”
Alessandro Caliandro (2017) “Digital Methods for Ethnography: Analytical Concepts for Ethnographers Exploring Social Media Environments”
James Mackay - Portfolio 