Look around. Every single person you can see right now, likely is either holding or carrying their phone. For 60 seconds you can own all 3,013,524 pixels of their iPhone. Their FULL attention. That's rare in today's world and that's the value of posting content. Numbers are not a healthy thing to chase, but I wanted to post some thoughts on my numbers after a good amount of time to reflect.

Want 1 million TikTok followers?

  1. Do something you could post about every day for years. (Something you have likely already been doing for years, or at least have been interested in for years.)
  2. Post about it every day. Promise yourself, be accountable to others (thank you Becca for being my accountability buddy).
  3. Learn from yesterday's video performance. (Format, audio, comments, sentiment, posting time.)

Do that forever...bet you won't.

I didn't know this when I started, posting everyday was a form of habit stacking for me and analytics just had a natural interest factor.

You are not a hamster.

I lasted roughly 600 days. Growing from 0 to 1.1m Followers. Posting over 1000 video's and enjoying every one. Some of them were terrible, some of them I'm really proud of. As of right now, I'm at 80m+ views and 12m+ likes. More importantly I've found literally millions of people who champion the things I'm interested in.

I've worked with NVIDIA, ByteDance Pico, Lost Universe, Menkind and had an opportunity to meet incredible people.

Roughly 1 in every 20 videos achieved 'good numbers' (50k+). With perhaps 1 in 100 achieving over 1 million views, pre-2023.

The algorithmic rut Once you start posting in a niche, TikTok will work out who else will like you and show your content to them too. The problem then comes, if you want to post about something new, or switch up your content format. You are actively swimming against the algorithm. You'll see a two week drop in numbers followed by steady improvement. As far as I have found, you can't keep switching. You can break out of a niche, but It's counterproductive to keep changing topic - which honestly makes perfect sense from an engineering point of view.

Quality matters Seriously. You don't need a fancy camera or even fancy lights. Most of my videos were filmed on an iPhone 10. But compare your video to everyone else's before posting. If your video is almost all black, pixelated or sounds like it's underwater, the algo will not show it to be people.

The great filter The algorithm is a thing of beauty. Virality on tap for the creators worth sending to the moon. In my opinion, there are a few thresholds the algorithm will pass your video through. First, it seems to understand every word you say, the topic, the audio quality and the image content. Once that happens you'll get your first 50 views. If this goes well you go to 100-200. Then 500, 1000, 4-8k, 10k, 50k, 100k. If your video get's all the way to 500k there's a high chance it will cross the 1m mark. This makes perfect sense, while your video is growing the algo is looking at the like count, the share count and the comment sentiment, if they all grow at a similar rate then it's full send. This is likely something that changes all the time, these thresholds do seem pre-defined though. Or...this is all in my head. I've been working on content recommenders for years at Carter Labs. Most creators think they have an idea of how they work. Mostly they are wrong. It's possible all of this is bs.

You are competing for distribution. If you study the TikTok Algorithm (or at least what it used to be) you'll notice there's a global recommender layer and a personal preference layer. This means the FYP can morph to what you're interested in while still serving you current content. If everyone is posting about a certain topic, you'll see it. But if you're also posting about that topic, you're competing for distribution. If you have a lot of competition on a certain day, even if you post a banger, your video might flop because there's a lot of videos like that competing for space on the FYP. The lesson here? Bad luck is common. I've posted the same video 2-3 times going from 10k views to 3 million views. No editing - just a different day.

Don't forget the humans There is a person the other side of that screen. Trust that the algorithm has ensured they are interested in you already. You do not need to convince them to stop scrolling, or introduce yourself. Get to the point.

"You may know me as the guy building JARVIS from Iron Man" This isn't a solid piece of advice. But it worked for me. Starting your video with a recognisable hook fuels follows. Why? Because if you have an ongoing project and the viewer enjoyed your previous video, when they hear the same hook again they will give you 2-3 seconds more retention out of pure interest. They won't remember your name or your profile picture.

Also...have you actually tried asking people to follow? Do they have a reason to want you on their phone again?

My mistake. In 2022 I took my eye off the ball to do a startup - not a bad thing. I met my co-founder through TikTok and built our original customer base off the back of the account. For mainly misguided reasons I decided to spend the next 24 months in the code editor rather than posting every day on TikTok. This literally paused my growth. The good news is that I am fine with this. Should I wish to continue I just need to warm it back up. I would however say that I should have hedged my bet. By being all-in on TikTok and not putting enough effort into other platforms like YouTube I am now in the position where 70% of my audience is in the US, but since the TikTok ban I rarely get 10% of US traffic. This is improving slowly but it used to be about 70%. The lesson here is, If things are going well, post to somewhere else too and tell people about it.

Content creation is not a project. It is a lifestyle. By that I mean, it never ends. Think hamster wheel, burnout etc. I didn't suffer from TikTok burnout, but I know many creators that have. You can't make videos forever and TikTok is the sort of place where once you stop posting, they don't value you any more - not because they hate you or expect loyalty, but because their content isn't evergreen. There's simply better content to recommend to people than your 3-month-old hot take on takeaway cutlery. If you want your content to be a steady source of income even if you're not active, YouTube is where it's at. Best way to grow on Youtube? TikTok.

Be yourself, have fun.

Follow me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@huwprosser