I Rigged the TikTok Algorithm To Make Me Go Viral

i figured out the tick tock algorithm in the last week i've gone from zero to a hundred thousand followers and along the way i learned way more and interviewed fellow tick tocker that really boosted what the algorithm saw my videos at reworked my strategy it's worked better than i ever thought it would and even use code to analyze 10 000 tick tocks and find averages but let's start from the beginning the tech world is more than just phones and computers so much of tech today is completely intangible purely software algorithms the things that truly run our lives that's why i started this series to try and figure out how these algorithms work but a lot of people pointed out that correlation doesn't equal causation and just by analyzing tick tocks on the for you page isn't going to tell me how the algorithm works so i had an idea i have seven days starting today to get as tick-tock famous as possible and throughout these seven days i'm going to be testing the conclusions i made in the original video here's how it's going to work i've already shot about half of the tick tocks i'm going to post but collectively i'm going to post 20 tick tocks over the course of the next seven days i'll mostly stick to tech content but they'll slowly shift into algorithm related content until the very last one where i'll be revealing that the audience has actually been part of an experiment the whole time it'll be our little secret until they find out each day i'm going to be testing my theories by using a control tick tock and two experiment posts the control will be the first tick tock of every day with no hashtags and no music so just a plain old video then the second tick talk of every day will use hashtags things that relate to the video as well as hashtag fyp and hashtag for you because as you'll remember from the first video i found that hashtags even those ones don't actually have a big effect on whether or not your video gets promoted and so here we'll be testing that and finally i'll be testing sound theory the sound theory also came from the first video it's just that having a famous sound in the background of your tick-tock will help promote your posts better than using a custom sound now obviously i'm not doing dancing tic tacs or something where i could put a famous sound in the background but there's a little trick to trick the algorithm into thinking that you are put a famous sound in the background of the tick tock and then turn the volume down a bit to zero then when the tick tock is posted it will have a famous sound on the bottom and be tagged under that sound but you won't actually hear it in the video it's a weird hack but i'm thinking it may help that last video of the day each day be promoted i've already edited the first three tick tocks so i think it's time to post them let's see how this goes the algorithm of tick-tock is more influential than nearly any other piece of tech in the world i've been covering tech on this channel for six years but there's a reason i switched over to covering this stuff this is the tech that matters today tic tac was by far the most downloaded app of 2020 and it's run exclusively by one algorithm and with tiktok controlling much of our lives the algorithm is ultimately responsible for much of the thoughts and beliefs of the general public i don't think a society has ever in history had so much reliance on a single computer software most social medias twitter instagram and youtube for example have different outlets for their algorithm to go the home tab explore tabs suggested videos but for tick tock there's just one place the 4u page and on the for you page unlike on youtube where you actually have to click on a video the algorithm of tick tock can literally just force you to watch something as you're scrolling it's just the next video it decides to put in front of you so not only is tick tock's algorithm ultimately the simplest in its objective but it's also the most powerful everything you do on the app comes down to the algorithm since nearly every video you see is completely and artificially fed to you by what it thinks you'd want to see and clearly the algorithm does a good job because as we said in the last video the average tick tock user spends 52 minutes a day on the app longer than a 16 year old's attention span so one algorithm has immense control on one billion people's lives you see why this is important but let's check in on how my account's been doing okay four day update it's 7 30 p.m on wednesday january 27th i published my first video on saturday january 23rd at 1pm with zero followers and we are now at 71 000 followers and 1.3 million likes whoa for one that's definitely more likes and followers than i've ever gotten on youtube and i've been doing that for 495 times longer but there's a reason for that tic toc's algorithm is just so much simpler like we just talked about and so followers views and likes mean something completely different but let's take a look at what's worked best my most viewed tick tock was this one about apple going backwards which has 2.8 million views more than twice the view count of my entire youtube channel and it's been two days but unsurprisingly that was in fact the third tick tock of the day with a famous sound in the background at a volume of zero of course but hashtags haven't seem to be helping as much the difference between videos with hashtags and videos without is negligible but it's clear that the famous sounds have been seriously helping my post and quite honestly it's worked better than i ever thought it would the average likes on a post with a famous sound so far has been a ridiculous 237 100. well the average likes for a video without a famous sound has been just eight hundred forty and now that i'm saying that out loud saying just fifteen thousand likes sounds absurd to me but compared to the others that's nothing so midday yesterday with all the crazy success i'd been getting i decided to change the plan a bit i'm going to be posting all my posts from now on exclusively with a famous sound in the background i mean we've seen that it clearly works and there's kind of nothing to lose as ultimately the real goal is just to get as big as possible in these seven days and i think the case is pretty much closed but i'll continue to test the hashtag theory alternating between videos with hashtags and videos without just to make sure there is truly no difference and quite honestly i was feeling really good and super confident in my plan at this point until this happened my video was under review my fast growth combined with the fact that i was uploading videos through my camera roll made tick tock suspicious that they weren't original so they blocked me from posting for a bit basically i was growing so fast they thought i was using bots but eventually this video went live but i haven't posted since so hopefully my next posts won't have the same issue worst case scenario they d my account to be fake and i'm not able to upload again for the rest of this experiment i guess we'll just have to see what happens and i'll talk to you on day six regardless of any mishaps with videos being taken down i think it's pretty clear at this point that things have been working and it opened up the possibility for maybe being able to hit a hundred thousand followers in one week but it was going to be close so i decided to talk to a creator who was absolutely blown up on tick tock who like me is doing it without doing a single trend his name is justice shepherd here he is i don't know if you even know the answer to this but why do you think that your tick tocks have succeeded the biggest reason is because when people see like a like a problem and they think that they can solve it they are tuned in and want to watch the whole thing and see if they can do it you know in their head it's sort of satisfying like seeing if you can get the answer so i think the watch time from those people that watch the whole thing really boosted what the algorithm saw my videos at pick something that you're passionate about focus on that and grab the user's attention in the first three seconds because if you don't somebody else will typically long videos like 60 second videos people aren't going to watch it so i would suggest keeping it no longer than 40 seconds i think every single viral video i've ever posted was no longer than 40 seconds 40 seconds was like the cut off gotta make tick tocks in that goldilocks zone from 20 to 40 seconds or medium length or at least i thought let's check in on how my account's been doing now okay it's day 7 and some things have happened first here's the update on the videos being reviewed it still happens and it's gotten worse it started to get better and videos were only taking a few minutes to get reviewed but then for whatever reason tick tock decided to take down one of my videos due to illegal activities and regulated goods it happened to be a video about tick-tock's algorithm so maybe they thought it was saying too much i don't know but i just decided to post the video again and now it's back up without any issues but let's get to the reason you're here the follow-up date we're just about to cross 90 000 followers and we're at 1.6 million likes and i've got five hours left in the challenge i've also switched my content to making more algorithm focused videos which happened to do a bit worse than the consumer technology related videos i was making before so the growth has gone down a bit but it taught me a lesson as i quickly realized that the audience on tiktok was not the same as my audience on youtube you guys may be more interested in social media algorithms and content creation but the literal nine-year-olds of tik-tok are more interested in tic tacs where they can argue over apple versus android in the comment section and that's not to diss tick tock there are a lot of intelligent people on the app but that general demographic explains why educational content tends not to do very well on tick tock and drama tends to do a lot better now i never truly made content anywhere near drama but the video that did the best for me was about controversial apple rumors so although it wasn't what would typically appear on tick-tock room it garnered a ton of conversation and comments which is what you want on tik-tok more than anywhere else but let's get to a quick update on the hashtags not much has changed but i gotta go because i have one more final tick-tock to shoot so i'll see you when the experiment is finally over so things seem to be going well on that front but this video wouldn't be complete without a deep dive into analytics in the first video i took a look at 100 tick tocks today we've stepped it up we've analyzed more tick tocks than views this video will probably get although maybe you could change that smash the like button down below for the youtube algorithm and we've gone for not a thousand not five thousand but one tick tock just kinda ten thousand tick tocks analyzed and let me show you what i found so out of the first 10 000 tick tocks that appear on the for you page when logged out with no preferences i found that 79.2 percent of videos on the for you page had hashtags in them no surprise given the popularity of the infamous hashtag fyp but when looking at the average likes a video with no hashtags averages 718 423 while a video with hashtags averages 547 thousand 252 now of course i'm not saying that adding hashtags is going to hurt your posts but as we've covered before there's very little evidence that hashtags help their posts either but there was tons of other interesting data too like how 16.5 of all people on the forum page were verified yet out of all 10 000 tick tocks charlie dimiglio appeared zero times and there was a ton of other stats too like how original sounds compared to famous sounds in the background where this data didn't agree with my last video in fact this data showed that videos with original sounds tended to get more likes which goes against a fundamental tick-tock belief but based on my own evidence and the evidence of countless others that one may just be an element of statistical randomness and it's possible that this data just happened to lean the other way but i don't know and i've linked all 10 000 tic tacs worth of data in the description have fun with it but let's take a moment to look at the final results of my seven-day experiment 100k we reached 100k okay actually we haven't i finished with 99k but by the time this video comes out we'll be at 100 and you ever heard a rounding i thought so so here's what i learned first of all i learned before i even started this that the algorithm needs individual videos they don't like series sure part twos are great but you need to be able to watch either part and understand it like the office you could probably start at a random episode in season six having never seen the show before and be fine but in a show like stranger things starting at season two wouldn't make any sense so on tick-tock the videos need to do well on their own i know because not only is that what i did but it's what i didn't do a little while ago just for kicks i tried uploading a condensed version of one of my old videos to youtube in six parts and nobody watched it because you couldn't watch each video alone and the algorithm doesn't like that because the way tic tac is built it only shows you one video from a single creator at a time but i also learned that tick tock's algorithm likes things that are different i may not have done any trends but that's just it it's different i was the only one on tick tock filming with a nice camera making informational videos and still stirring the pot with a bit of controversial apple rumors it didn't matter that what i was doing wasn't popular doing what's popular is a myth why would anyone watch your content if all you're doing is what everyone else is doing the fact that i did something so unique to tiktok by completely ignoring the trends was what the algorithm liked most it didn't matter that i didn't really follow the video length data i found or that i didn't use a famous sound when i first started it's just that i was doing something no one had ever seen before think of the algorithm like a person this person just wants to be entertained so they're going to watch some of the videos with trends and dances but eventually they're going to get bored so they're going to want to change things up and at the moment tick tock more than any other platform is full of rip-offs and copycats so doing something new is going to change things for the algorithm the algorithm's looking for new content to recommend it has a sense that everyone's sick of the top influencers on the app lacking any originality and with the algorithm's ultimate goal being to just keep people on the app as long as possible it wants new things to show everyone it needed me this week and it needs you let's change tick tock for the better starting with a like on this video and maybe a subscribe too because we're going to be diving into much more in the tech world than just algorithms but every day these algorithms take up more and more of our lives and it's more evident nowhere other than tick-tock and if the algorithm is going to take over our lives feeding out content day in and day out let's give it some good content defeat us i gotta go get back on tiktok and continue the grind and as always i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Jack Gordon

Views: 765,711

Keywords: tiktok algorithm, how tiktok works, jack gordon, i figured out the tiktok algorithm, tiktok growth, tiktok secrets, how charli damelio got famous, tiktok, TikTok growth challenge

Id: Fxe5ImKqBA4

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/anz3e]

Remind me! 16 hrs