How we grew Boost to 90k on TikTok
What is Boost
If you are here reading this then you probably know something about Boost, we are a creative agency based in Sri Lanka and we help brands grow digitally. Looking at our skills in designing and social media marketing we decided to launch Boost as a fully-fledged creative agency. But that’s not exactly how our viral TikTok grew.
How we grew
Fast forward back to December 2020 when we posted a random redesign video of a news app that we learnt on YouTube. It got around 4,000 views which was insane at that time. And that’s when a random person commented to do a YouTube redesign, since we couldn’t disappoint that random commenter we did it. It wasn’t the best design, to be honest, but we added people Paul and Dixie D’Amelio on the design because they were trending at that time. Dixie released her new album and Jake Paul made a video calling out Conor McGregor. A few hours after we posted we saw the video getting more than 50k views. It was absolutely overwhelming for us so we started scrolling through the comment section looking for a good redesign suggestion to do for our next video. And that’s how it started, we kept on doing redesigns of apps that people suggested and within 1 week we hit 10k followers with the youtube redesign video having more than 1 million views.
Understanding the Algorithm
After doing a few redesigns we started understanding why we were getting so many views. Our redesigns were amazing? NO. We added an element that was trending at that time, we used things that are left unnoticed, we made simple design errors, and combined some of the weirdest user interfaces. This resulted in more than 15 million views, 90k plus followers, thousands of comments and shares. This is when we started understanding the TikTok algorithm and how our videos went viral. Braking it down for you, TikTok shows videos to people in sets, The first set will be the most active audience of yours and If you perform well in that (generally more than 10k views in one day) TikTok shows the video to a bigger audience that has similar interest as the first audience. If your video does better in that audience too then that’s when it’s really going to get that big exposure like millions of views (happens at 100k — 300k views). If your video keeps performing well after that too rumours say that a TikTok employee will manually check the video and approve it for the next viral round. When we say “video doing well” it means getting more comments, shares, and watch time. Comments are a key component in the videos because they have likes too and each time a person reads the comment it increases the engagement. No wonder, shares are one of the most important things to go viral because it proves that there’s something other people might be interested in. The more times people watch the video the more likely it is for the video to blow up. We see people often complain that their video got this many shares but it still does not have many views compared to other videos, this is because people have engaged with your video in only one way and this is a big red flag for TikTok since it does not have a good average engagement.
So does your business need TikTok?
We get multiple inquiries every day asking how to grow on TikTok and our only advice is to focus on quality content, stick to a long-term strategy and stay consistent. Your audience can be small but as long as your goals are reached you’re taking home the W. This brings us to an important point in social media marketing and that’s identifying business goals before starting a campaign, imagine you want to promote a product that only does deliveries locally, at this point you can have low metrics but all of them are valuable if its reached to people only in your country. Our goal was to grow an audience globally and as of now, we have a majority audience that is based in the US and UK. In conclusion, TikTok is a great platform for any creator or business and you are going to regret it if you don’t hop on this viral train and take advantage of the free media