Exploring Fitness

I stuck to several simple, sensible tactics on TikTok. Here are the ones that got results, those that didn’t, and a couple of nifty tips and tricks I learned along the way.

30 days. 34 posts. 1 Live. 1 embarrassing dance. 3 copycat scammer accounts. 1 marriage proposal. 385K views.

And 1,194 followers gained.

For a TikTok newbie, that’s not too shabby, is it?

It’s been a few days since I wrapped up my TikTok experiment, and let me tell you, I’ve gained a few grey hairs in that time.

But, dear reader, it worked.

No gatekeeping here (if you know, you know) — here’s exactly how I did it. In this article, I’ll share all of my learnings from this weird and wonderful time: the tactics that got results, those that didn’t, and a couple of nifty tips and tricks I learned along the way.

Girl meets world TikTok

I spun up my TikTok account way back during the monotony of the pandemic and just could not get into it. We had video on Instagram — why was another short-form video platform necessary?

The interface was too different for my millennial brain, the content too raw (where were the aesthetic feeds??), and the app lay dormant on my phone for a good two years.

It was only about a year ago that I really started to get into TikTok, and even then, only as a user. The power of the TikTok algorithm and the idea of the platform as a search engine finally hooked me.

I found pockets of the platform that felt like home (love you, BookTok), and it finally dawned on me that, as a creator, I was really missing out.

At the time, I was feeling really despondent about my Instagram content, too. After being a diehard ‘Grammer who grew a modest following early on, my interest in the platform (and, to be fair, the platform’s interest in me) started waning. My sporadic posting on the platform just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

It took a couple of months (and several videos stuck in 200-view jail) on TikTok to help me fully realize the potential there. If I wanted to make this work, my Instagram and LinkedIn scraps weren’t going to move the needle. I was going to have to be strategic about this.

As this idea coalesced, I found my algorithm started to shift toward TikTok strategy content (sneaky little AI that it is), and I was getting all sorts of advice from TikTok's social media strategists. “TikTok wants you to be using Stories,” one creator spouted. “You need to be engaging with people for 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after you post,” another insisted. “Lives are the way to grow,” still another was sure.

It was a little overwhelming, to be honest. Still, in and amongst these weird and wonderful hacks was one nugget that came up time and time again, and I latched onto that:

Post every single day.

As tough as that sounded, it resonated with me. Consistency often trumps all else when it comes to social media success, and it’s one that’s worked for me on Instagram and LinkedIn.

The journalist in me itched to put it to the test. Was that all it took to go viral on TikTok?

So I gave it a bash. For 30 days, I shared a video or photo carousel every single day.

That was the major variable I wanted to test and the only one I committed to, though I did sprinkle a few other tactics into my videos that did make a difference:

• I leveraged strong hooks.
• I applied TikTok SEO where I could.
• I picked a niche and (mostly) stuck to it.
• I occasionally went above and beyond and shared more than 1 video per day.
• I tried a few trends and one TikTok Live.
• I did one silly dance (I don’t want to talk about it… OK, I will).

Spoiler alert: it worked. And then some.

I grew my following by more than 1,000 percent in just 30 days. To be fair, I had around 70 followers when I started and I’m now at a little under 1,300. Which does not make me a runaway success by any stretch of the imagination.

But I’m still really proud of that growth. Plus, I’m pretty sure that if I kept it up, my following would continue to grow at that pace. I won’t (but more on that later).

6 learnings from my TikTok experiment

1. A niche (or a handful of connected niches) is where it’s at

Defining a niche or choosing content pillars are other social media strategy staples — and with good reason.

(If you’re focused on growing your following, that is. More on this below.)

Finding a niche is particularly powerful on TikTok because of the way users engage with content and accounts there. If you’re a TikTok regular, think about how you use the platform. I’m willing to bet that you don’t switch to your following feed as soon as you open the app. TikTok’s For You Page (FYP) and the powerful algorithm that fuels it are just so darn good.

Sure, videos from people you follow are likely to pop up there, but for the most part, you’re seeing content from creators and brands you don’t follow that resembles the other videos you’ve engaged with (or watched to the end).

If you do find a video you enjoy or find helpful in your FYP, you may tap over to the creator’s profile to see if there are more. And if what you find there is a hot mess of all sorts of unrelated