What's the SECRET to Growing on TikTok?

I've grown my TikTok account to over 100,000 followers. I've also secured once in a lifetime opportunities just as a result of showing up. I didn't pay to grow, by the way. I just created a ton of content. Today I'm here to teach you everything you need to know about how to get your first 100,000 followers fast on TikTok. Consider this your TikTok masterclass. Now I want to be like fully transparent with you. The reason why I've been able to grow so much has actually not been because I've cared about followers. It's because I've cared about one other thing and that takes me to our first TikTok growth tip. And number one, and that is focus on engagement and not followers. And listen, I understand why it might be your first gut instinct to focus on followers. For the longest time we've glorified follower counts because we've always thought of followers equaling the amount of influence that someone has. Immediately you could look at a follower count and think that that person has power and influence. But all of that is changing because of the TikTok algorithm. TikTok takes the following metrics into account when they're thinking about engagement. Average watch time, percent of a total video watched, likes, saves, shares, follows, comments. All of those count toward engagement on the TikTok platform. You can even see in my own account how TikTok prioritizes those metrics. So on TikTok, even if a video doesn't earn a like from a viewer, if that viewer is watching the video all the way through, TikTok is still going to take that as a positive signal. So your biggest goal should be to create content that is highly engaging and that also encourages viewers to to watch the video for as long as possible, ideally all the way through. By the way, if you're thinking that you can like shortcut this with like a two second video, it's not going to work. I typically see videos that have high success rate to be between 15 seconds to a minute long. The longer people watch and do things like comment or share, the higher likelihood your video has the chance of hitting the bigger TikTok algorithm, also known as the for you page. And from TikTok's point of view, there really is no reason and them pushing a video that already has low engagement to the broader algorithm. And that reason being is that TikTok wants as many high engaging videos as possible because the more highly engaged you are, the longer time you're going to spend on the platform. And when you spend more time on the platform, TikTok has more opportunities to serve you ads. Plain and simple. Now I have just the thing for you if you are looking to grow your engagement. I recently came across this awesome, awesome report from HubSpot that teaches you how to grow your account on TikTok. And if you're looking for the blueprint on engagement and follower count like this is it. So I will leave a link to it in the description below. Check it out and let me know what you think. So how do you actually get people to watch longer? Let's talk about it. Let's open your TikTok account and we're going to scroll and we're going to find a video that piques your interest. So go to your TikTok account and go to the for you page and let's start start to scroll and see what pops up. I'll bet one of the biggest things you notice right off the bat is that the videos that are really good, they just pull you in and kind of hold your attention for a little bit. And I call that the three second effect. If viewers don't get pulled in in the first three seconds, they're out of there. And that's TikTok growth tip number two is make sure to pull people in within the first three second. Love you all. I do. There are some videos that pull people in that are result of great storytelling too that aren't just a result of the 3 second hook. And you'll notice that all of these videos, regardless of the hook or the storytelling, they create intrigue. It's dangling just enough of a carrot to convince people to watch just a little bit longer. Oddly enough, the videos that have performed really well for me on my TikTok channel have actually been the ones that either talk about a problem upfront in the first few seconds, it's actually happening. I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but Google might be in trouble or address something negative. Starbucks is just not having a good time. Every time I do that the video usually performs pretty now I create marketing content, but you could also easily do something like a ghost story and tell that in a really spooky manner or talk about and show your dog who loves to sit at the dinner table. Either of these videos could still perform really well because there's no niche that has a leg up over one another. It's all just utilizing that three second effect. Here's something else that works really well for me personally that I love to do that I now do in all of my videos. And that is this putting some kind of red text at the top that specifically like summarizes or creates a little bit of intrigue at the very beginning of the video. Now, how would you really know if you're creating enough intrigue in your videos? I have the perfect answer for you. TikTok actually introduced recently this thing called a retention graph, which you can actually find in your analytics on your TikTok account. After you create your video, you'll be able to go into your analytics, scroll to the graph and see the percent of people who have dropped off over a period of time in your video. The faster the drop off, the higher likelihood that your video just wasn't super engaging for people and you probably need to work on your hook or really taking advantage of the three second effect. The longer that people stay on the video that actually shows that it is pretty highly engaging and what you did works. The biggest takeaway here though is really to make sure that you plan out your content in chunks to get people to watch for as long as possible. Let me show you something. When I first started my TikTok account, I decided for some reason I thought this was a good idea to start writing on whiteboards. Now I wanted to continue writing on whiteboards because honestly, selfishly, it was really easy for me. But I had to stop one, because my videos weren't really performing that well. And then two, someone actually commented saying that they had a hard time reading my handwriting. That one hurt. If I wanted to succeed, I knew that I had to change and that meant getting uncomfortable and honestly, testing different kinds of formats. So TikTok growth tip number three is test until you know that you grow. This means testing everything. Testing different topics, different ways that you say things, different music, different styles, literally anything that you can think of to really see if you can move the needle on your growth. You'll also notice something if you go on TikTok frequently that your favorite creators are usually in what I would call like a content creation groove. They have either serialized content that they do over and over again, or they just have like a certain style that they know works super well. You have to find what works for you and stick with it, but you'll know what works for you based on the metrics that we talked about earlier. Are more people watching your video longer than other videos? Are people also watching your video more like they're watching it all the way through? And are you reaching more people? So that really means TikTok is pushing you into the for you page like are you actually growing and reaching people beyond who's following you? Listen, all in all, if you follow the five tips that we've talked about in this video, I know that you're going to succeed on TikTok. And listen, even if you don't get a hundred thousand followers, who really cares if you're succeeding at your goal? Reframe your mind, go out there and absolutely crush it. Oh, and I promised you my favorite hack at the beginning of the video, so let's talk about it quickly.

Hey, it's Jake again. Real quick, are you a B2B marketer struggling to measure your campaigns? LinkedIn and its marketing partners have you covered. From real time analytics to attribution reporting, LinkedIn and its trusted partners like HubSpot are transforming how you measure and optimize all of your marketing efforts. And here's something new for you the LinkedIn Revenue Attribution report. If you're using HubSpot or Salesforce or Dynamics as your CRM, you can now sync your CRM data to see the influence of your LinkedIn campaigns on the sales pipeline. Check the link in the description for their most recent ebook to see how marketers at businesses of all sizes are measuring the ROI from their campaigns. Now let's get back to the video.

Once you create a video and post it, start to engage with the comments as they come in for the first one to two hours. Why is this? Because when people land on a video, oftentimes their first inclination is to go look at what's going on, people said in the comments. And by doing that, it helps them ramp up their watch time so that your video ranks higher and higher in the algorithm. Try it for yourself and let me know what you think and I will catch you in the next marketing video.