📍 If you like going viral on TikTok, this blog is going to talk about ways that we can spot trends, ultimately create a viral video, and then the steps after the fact to capitalize on it for our business and marketing goals. Welcome to season four, episode eight of Let's Talk Social. I'm your host, Rich, and I'm going to be taking you through all three topics today.
This is something that we've recently done for a client. So it's fresh on the mind. And I wanted to deliver this to you guys before the holiday season starts. We've got Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving and Christmas all right around the corner, and New Years too! And then we are back into 2024. This will all hold true up until probably the end of 2024; there have not been many changes. As far as the things that I'm going to be talking about today, apart from AI and some other things coming into play on the marketing and customer relations side of things inside of TikTok. But this is about just the video making themselves.
I've got my notes on the phone here today. Nothing prerecorded or written up for you. So I'm going to just speak freely from the mind. We had a client video over the weekend gather over 300,000- 400,000 views. And so again, this just happened and I was taking the steps today (with all the notes I'm grabbing and delivering back to the team) on how we're going to be following up with this. I thought this would be a good topic to hit on right before the holidays.
So, the first thing we need to talk about really is the "trend spotting" on TikTok. So it's like, how do we identify the viral trends that are either up and coming or happening? And If you're just totally new to TikTok, or maybe you've been watching for a long time. Maybe you're a first time content creator, or you're just now starting to market your business on TikTok.
We have clients still to this day, just now starting. So don't beat yourself up on that, but this should be able to go over the importance of being able to do all this stuff and to try to leverage it for your business. The main ways that we've found to identify the up-and-coming trends inside of TikTok is monitoring the "for you" page.
So that's one of the tabs at the bottom there. Again, I'm going to talk like you don't know anything about it. One of the tabs is called the "for you" page. If we go onto the "for you" page and we engage with content from our business page that is similar to the content that we would be posting for our business, the "for you" page will get more and more curated to your business type itself.
So, that "for you page" will be eventually a really good feed that you can just cruise and swipe through and try to find ideas for your own business. On your personal page, it might be a whole different set of videos just because you might be engaging with things that have nothing to do with your business; more of the things that you're personally interested in. So, we train our business pages to interact with content that we would be posting and be around. And that way we've got a huge kind of hub of videos inside of the for you page or the Instagram explore page, for instance, where we can go and reference that anytime we're looking for videos.
The other thing that you can use is the analytics tools. There's a whole site where you can go to the TikTok Creator Hub and you can see the spiking - basically charts where it's going to show whether or not an audio is trending. They'll be approved for personal use or approved for business.
So if you're a content creator, not a business necessarily, there's even stuff for you guys on there. You've got the discover page and then your search tab. So the discover page will obviously have some new things that it will recommend. And same with the search tab. If you actually click on the search tab on the top, it's going to have a big list of things that you can scroll left and right on, and those are going to be things that are currently being searched a lot. So they're starting to trend, which means if you hop on that trend, you can go viral. One of the four main categories basically for trending videos are trying to identify things that are trending are the challenges. We've got the sounds or the music that can trend.We've got the actual hashtags themselves. And then we have the dances, which you won't find me doing any of those. But those are like the big four and the side of the main category. So you just have like normal trends. The client video I was referencing, that one is on a Thanksgiving trend right now.
That's an example of one there's also audio related trends. So there might be music or songs that are happening. There are hashtag trends and like challenges there. And then lastly, the dancing and everything. As far as your concern, you may not see a lot of dancing on TikTok. I do not personally, but like it's whole own kind of sub category of things going on.
That just seems to be one of the ones that has a lot of viral videos. That's why rappers right now are making songs specifically for TikTok so that they can have people dancing to them, going into the viral challenges and trends and everything. So, those are the four main things here. So we're going to use our search tabs or discover tabs and the "for you" page to try to figure out what our next trend that we're going to try to hop on is going to be. And from there, we're actually going to need to create the video.
There's a couple things inside of the anatomy of a viral TikTok video. I'm just going to go over the most important ones.And so we've got the overall length of the video is going to determine a couple things, some of the elements inside of the video. And then again, like using one of the trends. So as far as like the length of the video is concerned, the reason that matters is. The longer the video is, the chances of you having user retention throughout the entire video lessons. So if you create like a five minute video versus a one minute video, people are probably more prone to watching the entire one minute video than they are the five minute video. Obviously, there's content out there that can perform and do that. But the more watch them, the higher percentage of the video that is watched, the better because that's going to tell TikTok to serve that out to other people. So you probably have seen all the time on Instagram or TikTok, the like eight second videos have 800, 000 likes on them. And that's because the play through typically hits a hundred percent on those. That's a good thing to have happen.
Shorter is not necessarily better, but too long is definitely a thing. The other thing to pay attention to is the visual hooks inside of the videos themselves. So we're going to be looking at the kind of two main ways that we can get people hooked into the videos. We call them the primary and the secondary hook for the actual video itself.
So if we're making a TikTok, we have the primary hook, which is zero to three seconds. I have a whole video about this, a whole podcast episode about this, but those first three seconds there, something interesting needs to happen. The secondary hook is the four to 10 second mark, basically.It's the thing that happens after that first primary hook. That's also where we're going to need to have something interesting happen or a transition happen, or we start to explain what the rest of the video is going to be about. So the first one kind of grabs the user's attention and keeps them there.
In that split second, we're going to either visually show or explain what's happening for the rest of the video so that we can try to retain people for the entire length of the video. One of the last things that is going to get a high rate with the algorithm is going to just be the percentage of people that have watched to engaged.
So high levels of engagement. So this means we need to find the people that we want to actually see this video. So you might hop on a Thanksgiving trend, but if you're about EDM or hip hop music and the Thanksgiving trend still might relate to what you're posting, but you don't necessarily think everyone on the Thanksgiving trend is into that, then you need to use like certain hashtags or audios. They're going to tie the two of those together and that's ultimately going to help the actual engagement rate of the video itself. Higher engagement rates, higher watch through or like the play through rates is going to mean higher amounts of views and then engagement on the actual videos themselves.
So after we've actually created the TikTok and we have posted that out and everything, if we don't see engagement within probably the first 24 hours, if we don't hit a couple thousand views, we can anticipate that the video is not going to go anywhere, or do very well. That's just what we've seen in the past.
The client video that we just posted last Thursday only rendered 70,000 views in the first 24 hours. And then after that it was getting about 110,000 views every 24 hours. It's now at the 500,000 mark. And because of that, we're going to be now attempting to make a followup video or two to actually leverage the engagement and the lift and the algorithm right now.
On TikTok we've already gotten these 500,000 people to the page and everything, if we post a second video, whether it's about the same topic or at least the same general principle of the business, the thing that they came for and were interested in, right? The chances of us getting some of that audience back is really high.
That's just how the algorithm works. So if we're going to post a video out and it gets tons and tons of views. Typically two to four days is like a good window to wait to post our next one. Unless you already have millions of followers, if you have millions, you can do them same day, if not next day.
But in this case, for instance, this client has 160 followers on TikTok so not a lot at the moment, and they got 500,000 views. So it's been four days. Now we're going to be getting a second follow up video out and that video is going to re-emphasize and show the same thing, but in a different light, that product that we were featuring on there.
So the first video was them kind of putting the product together. So they're putting all the pieces together. It's slightly fast forwarded. So it's almost like a progression video. You can see the thing being made. And then the second video, we're actually going to show someone eating the items inside of this and then reacting to it, showing yum, this is so good, all the things.
And then we might even go into the rest of the retail store and just show like a pan left to right of the entire shop and then put on screen, follow for more content like this or something. So we're going to try to capitalize on a couple of things here. One is going to be actually selling the product that is in the video from the first video that went viral. We're going to show that same product in the second video with call to action this time. So if you want to order this online, click the link in the bio or whatever it is. And then we're also going to have a call to action for them to actually follow the page that they can like the page and see the next whole bits of content that we're going to be posting. We want to train the consumer to identify "Hey, if you liked this kind of stuff, like this page, because we're going to be posting more of that." And so that's the thought there. The second video is going to do the both of those.
And then if we get to the point where we have a third video, this is going to be one that we probably go all out on - the third video. We'll be predicated on whether or not the second video does well. If the second video renders, let's say, 100,000 views or 200,000 views, since we're a little more sales-y in that video, we may not get as high of viewership and engagement on that, but it's gonna be probably a lot of the spillover from the first video.
It's like trickling down, in a sense. The third video... It's going to be a hardcore call to action, good visual aesthetic. And we're probably going to show someone actually eating the thing or gifting it to somebody that it's a kid related item in this circumstance. So you might have a kid sitting down at a fake Thanksgiving dinner, pushing the tray over to them, watching them react to it and go, wow, onscreen texts order yours today to get shipped in and delivered by Thanksgiving.
And then again, we could do like a shop overview, or we could even have in the beginning of that video. The third one, a screenshot of the view count of the first video that we posted. So it's going to show maybe 600,000 views by that time, a screenshot of that. If you saw our viral video with 600,000 views, and then it proves you can deliver!
So, basically you have to even show people that it's popular in a sense. People like To be told what is popular & what's not. We see all the time in like our boutique marketing videos and the fashion videos and stuff, the ones that do the best is this is flying off the shelves right now, or you will not believe the next trend, any of that kind of stuff where you're telling them what's trendy, people don't inherently know what's trendy, they have to be told it or see it visually and have that re-emphasize to them over and over.
And especially for this client, while we're talking about the Thanksgiving video that we're posting for, it's a bakery that's making this stuff, we want to have them be an authority on this subject. And so "authorities" get to say what's trending and what's not trending; what's popular, what's not popular.
If she's (our client) has been doing this for 15 years, she ought to know, right? So it's okay to take this ,and be like our viral! It's called "turkey dunkers," the thing in the video, our viral "turkey dunkers" are now up for shipping. That can go down the whole thing. So that's going to be our plan of attack here.
First render a lot of videos and views have a light call to action, either to follow the page or to actually order one and then show an overview of the business. And then lastly, if that one does well, we're going to have a third video. Very call to action-y. All about just buying the product that is virally trending right now and something that you must have. And that way we can, (again, it might be like a trickle down in terms of viewership and engagement, but I would imagine) we're going to have a high amount of actual purchases placed. If not, at least we're going to grow the following that's on the actual page itself for the next stuff coming up.
So we've got Christmas around the corner, New Year's Eve, and Valentine's day is a big one for this bakery as well. So all of these holidays and micro holidays coming up, we're still going to be able to capitalize on well, just by gaining more likes and follows to the actual page. So that's the three elements there.
As we go into it, the big takeaways from the episode are to identify trends when possible as early as possible. We're going to make videos that have a great hook in the beginning of them that are very self explanatory and some level of visually engaging. Try to use a trending sound or audio if possible.
Time it related to your other videos, time the posting of it to where we're not putting them too close together. If we have a small page, we cannot post more than once per day; typically, if you have under a couple thousand followers. And then lastly, if we do have one, actually take off and go viral-How to capitalize on that and be able to post follow up content that will, narrow down the people that are watching, to become more and more sales pieces for us to actually leverage the engagement, and the action we've been getting here. So if you guys have any more questions about this topic, it's again, I just brushed over that in 15 minutes, but if you have any more questions about the topic, follow us on Instagram, YouTube, wherever comment, wherever you're watching/reading this or listening to this.
And I personally will get back to you. And maybe it's something I can put into the follow up episodes. We plan to, if all of this goes well and works right, we plan to actually make a follow up update on this in some format, whether it be on our Instagram or YouTube shorts.
We plan to post how the progression of this went, if we failed, or if we succeeded, the things we learned from that and what we'll be doing the next time as well. So if you guys liked the episode, drop a like, subscribe to us on YouTube and we'll see you in the next one.
