Tips for TikTok operation from foreign digital marketing experts

Corbin is a digital marketing expert from the United States. With many years of experience in digital marketing, he saw the huge commercial value of TikTok very early on.

Like many Americans, Corbin is a DIY enthusiast. During the pandemic, after moving into a new home, he began to try to film his DIY experiences and post them on TikTok. At first, Corbin didn't have high expectations. In the first few days, Corbin's videos performed mediocrely. On Sunday, his tenth video suddenly exploded, gaining a million views in just one day.

Currently, Corbyn's account recording his personal hobbies has accumulated 340,000 followers and 4 million likes.

As a professional digital marketing consultant, Corbin saw the huge potential of TikTok. Naturally, he began to use TikTok as a traffic channel and customer acquisition channel to promote his own business: digital online marketing agency services.

Corbin generously shared his methodology and some tips from his experience running TK.

“You have to understand why TikTok is such a powerful tool, even if you don’t have any followers, you can still compete with people who have millions of followers,” he said.

The reason is simple. Operators who have a little knowledge of short video platforms such as TK and Douyin know that the recommended traffic distribution on the TikTok platform is algorithm-driven and has little correlation with the fan base.

"Content planning and production are the most difficult part," he said. Corbin gave several very practical content and creative planning strategies.

The first content planning tip is to use Answer the public (https://answerthepublic.com/). Enter a product or category keyword and let the system give you a list of related topics in this field.

Then, based on the topics given by the system and your own thinking, choose some topics that can arouse the audience's interest and attention as creative directions.

His second technique is also a common technique used by domestic Douyin operators: research all competing accounts and content in your own category, analyze and learn from them. Enter the category keyword in the search box, collect the existing popular content in this category, analyze and imitate it.

In addition, Corbin suggested using the filter function to select recent popular content. By filtering the time index, you can find out the content themes that are more popular and liked by TK audiences at the current time node.

Zhang Qi, a phenomenal IP in the business knowledge category that became popular on the Internet in 2022, once talked about this methodology in detail. Zhang Qi's personal appeal and expressiveness are one aspect, and another important factor in his success lies in the in-depth research and insight into the content themes.

Zhang Qi and his Boshang management team will collect and disassemble the content topics of content creators in the same track on short videos and other content platforms. Based on accurate user portraits, all topics that Chinese small business owners are interested in will be collected and compared across the entire network. The final list of topics has been verified and will definitely attract the targeted audience.

After the topic is determined, the presentation and structure of the video itself are the key to whether the video can become popular. The golden three seconds mentioned by domestic Douyin operators are called hooks by overseas operators. Foreign TK operators also agree that hooks (golden three seconds) are the most important variables that determine video data performance. Corbin listed several very useful types of hooks.

List hooks

For example: 5 things you don’t know about TikTok operations?

How to (How to question hook)

For example: How to make your first thousand dollars with affiliate marketing?

How to get the 1,000th TK fan?

Reason why

For example: This is why your TK account cannot grow

Curiosity hook

Example: I can’t believe no one is talking about this.

As for the range of video length, Corbin's view is the same as that of many domestic Douyin operators. The length of the video is not important. As a TK operator, you only need to focus on the strong hooks that make the audience stop and watch, and the total time the audience watches your video.

The understanding of overseas TK practitioners and domestic Douyin content practitioners is becoming more and more consistent. Why should we pay attention to hooks and duration? Corbin's arguments are similar to those in China, because the logic of platform traffic allocation is based on the optimization of platform interests. TK or Douyin and other platforms themselves demand longer user usage time and more users. User usage time and number of users determine the platform's own monetization ability and commercial value.

Now that we know the platform's demands, we can deduce two key indicators that determine traffic distribution: average duration and sharing rate. The average duration indicator is the platform's measure of how long your video can lock users for the platform; while the sharing rate indicator means how many new users your content can import from the outside or how many existing users can be activated.

Different platforms in the domestic mobile Internet ecosystem are relatively fragmented. We all know that we cannot directly share Douyin videos to other platforms such as WeChat. In the overseas Internet ecosystem where all platforms are interconnected, the sharing rate is an indicator that TK platform attaches great importance to.

Corbin used the content performance of his own account to demonstrate the importance of these two indicators.

He first selected a video that performed moderately (84,000 views).

The two indicators of this video are: the sharing rate is 254 times; the average duration is 28%. From the source of video traffic, it can be seen that most of it comes from attention traffic, rather than system recommendation traffic.

The two not-so-good indicator data determine that the platform will not push the video to the larger FOR YOU recommendation traffic pool.

Corbin found another popular video with tens of millions of views for comparison. The average viewing time of this video is close to 50%, and a large amount of traffic comes from FOR YOU recommendation traffic.

Corbin added that based on his own operational experience, if the average viewing time is close to or exceeds 50%, the video is likely to become popular.

Of course, experienced TK operators know that TikTok traffic distribution is also uncontrollable. Even similar videos (same creativity, same structure and similar presentation) can have very different performances.

Most domestic TikTok operations utilize an account matrix strategy, using sufficient volume to deal with the uncertainty brought about by probability.

What problem is unsolvable?

If a team of one person like Corbin can make money on TikTok, we Chinese sellers will definitely be able to leverage TikTok and unlock new growth possibilities!