The TikTok algorithm is a complex system designed to serve users content on the app’s homepage — the “For You” page, where TikTok users discover new contents. The algorithm has never been officially revealed but acording to TikTok: “The system recommends content by ranking videos based on a combination of factors — starting from interests you express as a new user, and adjusting for things you indicate you’re not interested in.”
All in all, if you can get TikTok to start showing your video on the “For You” page to a lot of other people that’s where the virality comes in.
In this article, we will take a deep dive into the inner workings of the “For You” page algorithm, including what factors are taken into account, how engagement is measured, and tips for how to improve your chances of appearing on the page. Understanding the algorithm will help creators create more effective content and build a larger following on the platform.
The Most important indicator to go viral: Watch Time and Watch Percentage
But how to get your contents to the “For You” page? There are obviously multiple pieces to TikTok’s algorithm but the the number one thing that TikTok cares about is Watch Time and Watch Percentage according to our research so far.
Let’s take a look at 2 video examples from the same TikTok account.
These two videos last 59 seconds and 52 seconds, no huge difference, but the average watch time for the first video is 32 seconds, while the second video is only 16 seconds. As you can see from the analytics that the majority of the people watched the first video are from “For You” page, that’s why it has way more views and engagement than the second video. As for the second video, it only has very few views and engagement compare to the first video, because most of its viewers are from personal profile. Tiktok apparently think this video it not good enough to be put on “For You” page.
So keeping people watching your videos is huge and longer videos will tend to do better in most of my experience, but only if you can keep people watching those long videos. This means if you can get somebody to watch 100% of a 15 second video, or 40% of a 30 second video you’re much better off making that 15 second video and getting somebody that watches 100% of it because that tells TikTok that they watched till the end and they liked every bit of it.
But if you can get somebody to watch 100% of a 30 second video or 100% of a 15 second video, then that 30 or 15 second is better because TikTok thinks this person managed to capture people’s attention for 30 full seconds.
So, how to make a 50-60 second video on TikTok that would keep people watch 30 or 40 seconds?
#1: Curiosity Designed Hook
The first and the absolute most important thing is a curiosity designed hook. And what a hook is what you say in the first five seconds. When videos have an intriguing hook, viewers will most likely watch till the end or even on repeat.
Let’s do some rearech on TikTok to find out how the viral videos makes use of this trick.
You can literally search any topic related to your niche on TikTok. But as an example, I used #sidehutsle here.
I quickly found a 32 second video generated 5 days ago and already generated 1.8M of views, while the account only has about 24k of followers.
So, how this video hooked viewers for the first 5 seconds?
First is the well designed thumbnail. This thumbnail doens’t have any speicial graphic elements but have some tricky keywords info, which is “lazy” and “$500/day”. Honestly who’s not lazy? And who doens’t want to make $500 while being lazy? So he’s really doing a good job by using a customized thumbnail with enticing caption.
Second is what he says in the first a few seconds. He said “We’re back with another lazy side hustle that helps you print money.” Later in the video he also used a few tricks. For example, he suddenly put lots of text on the screen right after he hooked people to watch this video so we can guess that most people will replay the video to read the text.
Btw in the end of the video he says: “If you do this 8 hours a day, you will make $500.” Let’s not discuss if this theory is true, but I would like to mention that 8 hours a day is not side hutsle at all, but a full time job. So this video is not really informative and helpful to the viewer but TikTok apparently doen’t care about that. What this video succeeded is not about the useful infoamtion it provided, but getting people’s attention for 30 seonds, and that’s exactly what TikTok wants.
Next, let’s try to search “kitchen products” and I quickly found a video produced about 10 days ago with 2.1M of views and has really high engagement rate (12%).
Although this account has 3M followers but most of its videos don’t have that amount of views as you can see from the follwoing screenshot. One thing worth noticing about this account is that almost all of their videos have really high engagement! Let’s find out how they do it.
The video starts with ”Amazon Kitchen Hacks. This electric butter sprayers means no more struggling with cold butter. Place a slice of butter inside, …”. Although this video is in completely different niche, “#1 Curiosity Designed Hook” rule applies in this video as well. The hook of this video is well designed and formed as a promise, a promise of solving the pain of struggling with cold butter.
Although the video is rather simple, just made for showing people how the product being used and how it can help to solve the problem, the video has lots of jump cut, only to show the most important clips within limited time.
#2: Tricks to Create High Engagement Rate that You Can Learn
Create Shock
I mentioned before that the videos from the account “mik.zenon” have really high engagement, and their high engagement rate is no coincidence. Take the video above as an example again, one of usage examples the video was showing is to spray the butter on the cereal. So many people were surprised, so they commented like “WHAT? BUTTER ON CEREAL?”
Create something people can relate to their life so they will @ their friends or family in the comment.
By search “Tshirt Birthday” I found a great example. The following video is about the process of making a DIY birthday T-shirt, although it’s a rather simply made video, it received 194k views and achieved 23% engagement rate, and this account only have over 1k followers.
#3: Use Trending TikTok Music
On TikTok, music and sounds have a tremendous impact on engagement and increase the chances of your content being seen. I think it’s important to understand about TikTok is that it used to be called musical.ly where it was all built around music people were supposed to be creative using music, then Bytedance bought it and rebranded it into TikTok. Now people are using it for all kinds of things but it’s it’s core algorithm is still built around music and if you’re not posting music with your videos you’re losing huge opportunities because the entire theme around TikTok is built around you putting music to something on the screen.
All in all, on TikTok, trends mean audio. Different sound clips work like hashtags on the platform. You can tap on the background audio of a video to see more videos that use the same sound and you can use that sound in your videos, too. Often, specific audio will be matched with a specific meme or joke.
Trends are a powerful pillar of organic content because they have the potential to go viral. If you post a video using the right trend at the right time, you could get millions of views.
Here are a few key stats from studies conducted by MRC Data and Flamingo to prove this theory:
- 67% of users want to see TikTok videos from brands that feature trending audio
- 68% of users say trending audio helps them remember the brand better
- 58% of users say they’re more likely to share an ad that features trending sounds
- 62% say they’re curious to learn about the brand after watching a video with trending sounds
Below is a great example of using trending audio on TikTok. The video is about recommending books, the video is very simple but with beautiful and popular song in the background. This video achieved 2.1M views and 16% of engagement rate.
Trend videos help you produce a high volume of content without putting in too much effort on production or original scripting. They also show that you understand TikTok from the inside.
But you also have to know: if you only post trend videos, then you won’t get conversions. To turn your trend video viewers into new customers, you’ll need series of related videos and community engagement content.
Understanding the algorithm of TikTok’s “For You” page is the fist step to grow your TikTok channel. In the future article we will discuss how more and more people are using TikTok as a search engine, and how we can make use of it to create contents that people are looking for.
