TikTok Week 3 — No pain, no fame & first experiment-wide learnings

This is the thrid of four reports about my 30 day TikTok challenge. If you’re new, start with how and why I started and the week 2 report. Let’s get to it!

After the novelty of this challenge vanished last week, I got challenged this week with a freelance job and a short but sweet vacation. One of my objectives was to produce content ahead of time but as I tried that, mexican memes upset my plans. More on this below.

In this third report, I will already give you a sneakpeak into the final reflection, where I evalute the whole experiment, what I learned from it and what I would do differently next time. Here is what I made this week:

Week 3 content

Day Fifteen(0:19) — Five spanish things every German knows Typical TikTok content made late at night.

Day Sixteen (0:11) — What`s “Fuck my life” in Spanish? I washed a tissue with my laundry (can not recommend).

Day Seventeen (0:32) — Learning “groserias” on the street I expected this to work a bit better, but probbbbably the topic is not exactly novel.

Day Eighteen (-) — I took a freelance job and was busy filming the whole day.

Day Nineteen (0:43) — Nunca, Nunca This one was fun! Learning drinking games in Spanish came in very handy on the Friday before the Dia de los Muertos weekend in Mexico! 👻

Day Twenty (0:40) — How to get rich quick Quite a common format on TikTok (at least in my crypto-heavy feed) and I made my own version at the horseraces. Irony included.

Day Twenty-One (0:28) — Glamping in Las Estacas If you are ever around the city, make sure to spend at least a day, if not a night in Las Estacas! Beautiful place to swim and enjoy the ☀️

How it went and what I make of it

The views are pretty consistent, consistently low. Over the days, more and more views accumulate but its pretty safe to say, that none of my videos broke out of it’s organic view bracket.

Why is that? TikTok values three elements strongly: If the video is fully watched, if it gets shared and if it leads to a follow. Looking at the content I produce, I can very well understand that it doesn’t make people share or follow — I wouldn’t do it either. Looking at accounts I have followed in the past, it was almost always after the creator provided significant value to me, for example on how TikTok works or via the right mix of surprise and fun.

What value do I provide?

So what is the value that my content provides? Since I only shared one informational video (5 free things you can do to practice your Spanish) the value my content aims for has to be entertainment. Entertainment on TikTok can be broadly subdivided in fours categories: Comedy, Music, Awe, and Running Gags aka. The-One-Who-does-X. Here are a few examples:

Comedy

Check out this one for example, I find it hilarious:

Music

A bit older already but impressively funny. There are a few more musicians who make songs out of everyday situations, pretty cool!

Awe-inspiring content (often puppies)

There are loads of animals on TikTok, watching them can be entertaining, even though it’s not really my jam. Other forms of this are expensive cars, expensive homes and expensive lips, hips and tits (which often correlate, unsurprisingly). Here is a funny animal video:

“What do you do for a living?”

There are several people doing the same thing over and over again, with great success. One of the most prominent examples is the “What do you do for a living?” guy asking luxury car owners. A slightly more local option (at least I believe that he is Mexican) is this guy pretending to run:

So where does my content fall into?

It doesn’t, really. I tried many different things: I made sketches, asked random people on the streets and shot “this was my day” videos which are more common in Instagram Stories. To some extent, this was the point of this experiment, to try out TikTok and understand, why people do what they do to be successful.

But this also means, that apart from the high-level thoughts laid out in the first report, it makes sense to think about formats, the attached production effort and how to make it a routine in my workday. More on this next week!

This week’s TikTok Learnings

1. No value, no views
   Pretty obvious but easy to forget when making content: Be very clear what value you want to provide, how you provide it and how to measure if it is perceived as such.
2. No time to make videos, no views
   I was more busy this week and went on a little trip over the weekend, which left less time for me to produce content for TikTok. It can be annoying to have to post every day 😇
3. Choose a style
   I touched upon that in the last article and will write more about it in the final review, so this is more of a reminder: Do something you’d do anyways, so making the videos itself is fun — no matter how they are received. In my case, I am learning Spanish but there are 100 ways to make content around that. To be consistent (and cut down the effort to make content) it helps to choose one style of videos.

That’s it for this week! Next week I will take a trip to La Paz, Baja California. Curious to see if travel content can make a dent into my stagnant following!