How to Become Popular on TikTok: Currently Actionable Ways

TikTok is used as a free source of subscribers for other channels — Instagram and YouTube. The thing is that TikTok algorithms let you be recommended and reach millions without any investment, whereas they only watch an individual video and not the entire account. This is why it is significantly easier to become popular on TikTok.

On Instagram, for example, even if a post gets recommended (the Explore section), it will not reach thousand times more than other posts.
On TikTok this is possible, therefore bloggers who create interesting and trending content, enjoy very fast organic growth.

Effective Ways how to Become a Popular TikToker

We will describe the most efficient ways that will help to become popular on TikTok.

How to Get Recommended?

Once uploaded, a video is shown to several users. Yes, in fact it is already recommended but to a very small set of users. Thus TikTok determines whether the video is interesting or not.

The system analyzes how viewers behave: Do the watch till the end? Do they like or comment? Based on these activities, TikTok decides if the video is interesting and should be actively recommended to other users.

Recommendations are influenced by:

Repeated views
TikTok checks if the video is re-watched. Repeated watching means the viewer’s interest. Many bloggers use it: e.g. talking in details about a café, movie or book during the video and only give the address/title in the very end with a short clip, so that viewers have to re-watch the video to snap it.

This approach was taken by funcolle as the basis of the account’s content strategy. The videos show ordinary situations, for example, characters are checking in a hotel and look round the room. Then suddenly one of them tells the other: let’s get out of here. So the viewers are to guess what is wrong with the room, as noticed by the characters. They re-watch the video looking for clues, details, looks of secondary characters. And they comment on what they have found. So this is a great recipe for increasing engagement and an important lifehack to become popular on TikTok.
Time watched
If a video does not hook at once, it will be passed by. The less is number of viewers who watch the video till the end, the smaller are the chances to be recommended. Hence the high popularity of videos with the over-long intrigue, where you have to watch till the end to get the point. And this is why it is so important to hook a viewer from the starting seconds.
Shares
They influence recommendations just as with other platforms. To gain more shares, TikTokers sometimes make videos breaking the fourth wall. For instance, “This video is shared with you by someone who loves you”. Or “Send this video to a friend, so they would reply with a frog image to prove they really watch the videos they get and not just write ‘funny’ in reply”. This is an excellent route to becoming popular on TikTok.
Comments
Of course, discussions increase the chances to get recommended. Comments may be provoked differently. As different from other social media, TikTokers rarely ask questions to the audience. Self-initiated comments are more common – when a video makes laugh, surprises, scares or reminds of a similar experience.
Likes
TokTok users are quite generous likers. People often like videos for themselves – to show to the algorithm they need more of such content.
By the way, if your For You feed turned some wrong way, you can quickly steer it back on track by liking videos of a relevant subject, which you can find by hashtag search.

These are important factors to become popular on TikTok. To begin with, choose for yourself those that are easiest for you to influence.

How to Gain Followers?

Thousands of likes under a video will not secure popularity and regular audience for you. On TikTok you quickly gain popularity but you lose it quickly, too. What the audience remembers is not you but the video where you once did something funny or unusual. This is an important point how to become popular on TikTok.

Therefore you need to create content regularly in order to promote your account on TikTok and gain popularity. The posting frequency here is higher than in other channels — influencers post 3 to 5 videos a day.

Those may be shot in advance and left as drafts. But you will need to shoot new videos within a week to reach trends — the sooner you shoot a video for a new trend, the more chances you get to end up in recommendations.

You need a single concept so that people would rememder, recognize and follow you. This is the subject that you make videos on, or a gimmick, or a special format. This is an important point if you are truly interested in becoming popular on TikTok.

For example, onlychristiantye found a way how to become popular on TikTok by creating stories in messenger dialogues. Almost all the videos are made in the same format: the guy is standing in front of a chat in a recognizable interface and colorfully reads it out loud. The gimmick is in the stories themselves and the recognizable format. Christian already has more than 2.7 million followers.

At first, users hit upon a video on the For You page, then go to the account to watch the second part and find dozens of such stories there. If the user likes the format, they subscribe.

Content by onlychristiantye – stories in dialogues

Yes, if you make videos on different subjects, you will receive views, get recommended and even subscribed to. But your popularity on TikTok would grow much faster if you find your own concept and follow it.

How TikTok Ads Work

TikTok has its Ads Manager. Until recently, there was only one promotion format available — inFeed Ads. The traffic can be directed to a website or an app. Yes, the format does not allow promoting a TikTok account directly.

Major advertisers can directly arrange with the TokTok team for the launch of a native format — for example, a branded challenge or another type of inFeed Ads — the track will be clickable then and the profile picture will lead to the brand’s account. Such ads allow getting followers to a TikTok account but minimum budgets are high here.

In spring 2021, TikTok launched Boosted TikToks — an equivalent for post promotion. The ad format allows promoting videos from your account and gain subscriptions.

Advertising by TikTokers

As with any other platform at its very start, the TikToker ad market is not regulated. All the agreements are reached directly, so the rates may vary widely and no one would guarantee the result.

In October TikTok published the requirements for ads by influencers in order to improve the quality of ads on the platform and protect users from unreliable information.

So, how to Promote a TikTok Account in 2021?

Create content
This is the most reliable, simple and cheap way to promote on TikTok.
Yes, content creation takes time and sometimes money. But content rules on TikTok, so even big promotion budgets will not bring you good results if you do not have quality content.

You can analyze the content of your or others’ TikTok pages for free using Popsters. The tool will help to find the most popular content, compare data between any accounts by 25 metrics in a graphic format, make reports in a couple of clicks.

Track the updates of TikTok’s targeted ad formats
Promotion of videos and accounts on the platform is not available yet, but this feature will be launchedsoon.
Experiment with advertising by bloggers
Today, while the market is wet, it would take more time and networking. But the starting results will also be low, as is shown by other platforms’ practice.

If you still have not started your promotion on TikTok, just imagine that this is Instagram and the year is 2014, and you receive a letter from future: “Write 6 long posts and spend your spare cash to ads”. :)

Useful articles on a similar topic:

How to Check TikTok Analytics and Statistics of any profile;
Most important YouTube Metrics that give insights;
TikTok Shadow Ban: What it is and How to Fix It?
How to Go viral on TikTok: easy and effective tricks.