Edge Newsletter #11 - What I learnt after 10 months of making TikTok videos
What I’m Watching
I’m a big fan of Noah Kagan’s YouTube channel. Noah is a serial entrepreneur who was an early employee at Facebook who subsequently founded AppSumo.
His latest video Asking Supercar Owners How To Make $1,000,000 is very entertaining and insightful as I’m always interested in the kind of industries people are in. Noah’s entire channel is very bingeworthy, he’s improved his production value over time and focuses on entrepreneurship, side hustles and finance. Highly recommended!
Resource of the Week
I’ve only recently discovered Movielens. It’s a movie recommendation site. What makes it different is it’s non-commercial and run by a research lab at the University of Minnesota using some pretty fancy algorithms.
When deciding what to watch on a Friday night, have you ever wished you could switch between a ‘singular value decomposition algorithm’ or ‘item-item collaborative filtering’? Me neither! But now you can. (It most recently recommended me Chocolat - an old Johnny Depp film which I recommend).
Quote
Not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Viktor Frankl - Man’s Search for Meaning
Thoughts
I started my TikTok channel in August last year not knowing what to expect. We’re now 10 months in and here are a few things I learned along the way:
Forget about going viral
I think a big misconception about a lot of creators looking to start out is placing too much emphasis on going viral. There are a couple of issues with this, it places a lot of pressure on the creator based on something not entirely in their control. When videos don't perform it’s very disappointing. It focuses attention on the wrong place. Having a video go viral can be a double edged sword because while it’s good for the exposure it also can bring in the wrong audience.
Consistency is king
If you’re looking to take TikTok (or any social media) seriously, you have to treat it like a business. So that means putting in the reps, and setting up your own system. Not posting when you feel like it. Personally, I set a schedule for 4 videos a week. Building trust takes time, there’s no replacement.
Constant improvement
As Mr Best said, your only priority should only be making the best videos possible. Everything else will come. I think a big disadvantage of people that have gone through the more traditional education routes, school, college, and university, (myself included) is two things when it comes to being a creator. They tend to seek permission/suffer from analysis paralysis. I gave myself a lot of excuses before starting: no one taught me how to speak on camera, I don’t know how to script, how often should I post, what should I post, what niche, and a thousand other things.
The second thing is being a perfectionist. There is no right or wrong answer. It’s such a new space, even companies with multi million budgets are figuring it out. I’d often finish a video, watch it back and think to myself, ‘omg that’s a really crappy video’. And I was right a lot of the time! But that’s the process. I learnt to accept and embrace the crappiness and make small improvements over time.
Growth is not constant
Another thing to accept is that the vast majority of your views, followers and engagement will only come from a small handful of your content. My growth so far has had some great days followed by long periods of little activity. It’s very difficult to know how well a video will do before you hit that post button, especially early on. This is why it’s important to be consistent and push content out there, nothing is wasted.
Making videos that provide value
Views are only a small part of the story. Also, that is not the goal apart from ego. For a video to be pushed out and reach the right audience it needs to have high engagement. So people need to want to watch it all the way to the end before dropping off. So a ‘hook’ within the first 3 seconds is vital.
People commenting on the video, yes even negative ones, a lot of the time these spark an interesting debate and there’s often an element to truth to them. The only comments I delete are spam.
People wanting liking, favouriting, and sharing your video.
So it all boils down to making good videos that people want to watch.
Something I’ve not experimented with much is live sessions. I plan to set up a once a week schedule and see how that affects things. I will post back here on what I learn along the way.
What did you think of this week's newsletter? Anything you want more of, less of, questions just hit reply. I read all emails.
Hans