675 – Learning to use TikTok: Tom talks TikTok Techniques

Episode 675 – TikTok Techniques
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 675 of Screw the Commute Podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about some of the TikTok techniques I'm trying to incorporate in my videos. Now, I always have to mention I am not an expert at this. I'm taking you along on my journey. This is about the third week. Next week I'll give you an update on the first month of how I've done on TikTok. But I'll tell you some of the things I'm paying attention to and improving my videos and and technique as we go. Hope you didn't miss episode 672 and 669. These are again part of my journey on TikTok, my first week, second week, and then this is the third week with techniques I've been working on. All right. I want to thank the folks contributing to Patreon. This is something that we're asking you to help out with, to help with our program, to help persons with disabilities with scholarships to our school. We're getting them trained in digital and Internet marketing so they can have good jobs and and work their own business or both. So thanks for helping out with that. We started as little as $3 a month for all this great training that I try to give you. There's hundreds of episodes at screwthecommute.com/training and then tons and another 400 or so episodes of interviews with great entrepreneurs. So kick something in at screwthecommute.com/patreon. Thank you so much.

[00:01:56] All right. Let's get into the main event. These are some of the techniques and I'll give you a briefing on the kind of things. But it's just like everything that I teach and it kind of frustrates me a little bit that people don't understand. Or maybe it's just the ways of the world now that people want to learn these things. Don't want all the details, though. They just want the success. Well, you know, I haven't had any kind of great success. I mean, I'm getting success because I'm consistent and persistent and improving all the time and building something. You know, I haven't had a million views on anything all of a sudden. No, I'm building towards a great marketing vehicle, So everything that I teach has details like this. And so so if you want to be successful, you got to suck it up and learn how to do stuff. And you can't just farm it out to somebody that doesn't know how to do it. It pretends how to do it. Okay? You have to learn what needs to be done. And when you get really good at it is when you can delegate some of it that to make things go faster. But if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to you're going to be frustrated and you're going to blame it on, Oh, TikTok doesn't work. Instagram doesn't work.

[00:03:11] Facebook, No, you just didn't do your work. That's the that's the thing. All right. So let's get into some of the things that I've had to learn. And these are in no particular order. Looping. Looping is to get more views. And this is where the end of your video sounds like it's not the end. It leads right into what you said in the beginning of the video. And so people don't even realize they're back watching it a second time or sometimes a third or fourth or fifth time all at once. So that increases your views. That makes you look better to the to TicTok, who then will show you to more people. So that's looping. You should put a call to action at the end. Get him to follow you, get him to comment, get him to like, do something, share things. So I have to improve on that. I'm so intent on giving good information. Sometimes I don't put a call to action in. Engagement. And that's one of the things that makes you look better to TikTok is that. People have commented or liked or shared or done some of those things. So you must encourage them because it's easy for them. And in a half a second to go to the next video. So remind them to do these things. Another thing that TikTok originally came from was music and sounds and trending sounds. And one of the places you can find trending sounds is talk board Tok, and it's on the music trends.

[00:04:48] And you can add those to your videos and you can put the volume down lower, right? So you say, Wow, I don't know. It'll take me 3 hours to find a piece of music that exactly matches my stuff. Well, if you're not good at that, like I'm not, you just reduce the volume of it. As long as it's there, you're better off than if it isn't there. So if you get really good at it, you can make music match what you're doing, and that's an improvement that I haven't mastered. Oc playlist. Once you get so many subscribers, they give you an option to make playlists which help people binge watch your content more so you can lump it all together. So I'm not there yet. I got to get, I think 1000 sub 1000 followers to do that. Lincoln bio. You get one link. Just I think it's like, like Instagram in your bio and that needs to go to something important for you. But most of the people lead to what we call a link tree, which leads to a place that lists all your stuff. So you only get one link in the bio and it's not even clickable until you know you have to earn your way to make it clickable. So I had to use pretty links to make mine shorter. And I've been getting, I think 600 or 700 people popping over to just see who I am.

[00:06:13] But they very few of them have clicked through to my actual link tree because it's not clickable. They have to type it in. So they're forcing me to earn my way to get 1000 followers. So I get rewarded with that click through link where they can just click on it. And that's going to mean a lot to me because I have a lot of stuff to sell. All right. And one of the tips I got was don't play and try to please your followers. And that sounds counter intuitive, right? It says, please, the audience. That would be your followers if you got in front of them. So that means try to find who would be most interested. And that's how you tell TikTok who to put your video in front of. So you tell what it's about and then who should be watching it. And you can do that in your description and your hashtags. Let's see. Another really important thing is called completion rate. So if you do things that make people watch a higher percentage of your video, TikTok like shimmer and it'll show it to more people. Now, one of the things you can do. It has put the words wait for it on the screen. Now, if you put the words, wait for it, and then there's nothing to wait for at the end.

[00:07:35] Noble people will just get rid of you immediately because you trick them now. So I've used it sparingly. For instance, I have this puppy video where this these puppies are racing and it looks like one of them's going to win. So I put wait for it because right at the end, that puppy that was in front took a big tumble and lost the race. Right? So it was really funny and cute. So I put wait for it and there was something to wait for. But if you put wait for it and there isn't, then they're going to leave you and never come back. All right. So that's one thing. Another thing is to use lists of things like the five tools that I use every day in Internet marketing. All right. So people will want to see all five, so that'll make them last longer. So that's just a couple of examples of how you can get the completion rate higher. Now, the length of your videos, I can't tell you what length. In fact, I don't know for sure what length I should make mine yet. So I've been making them all over the place. And then I'm going to look at my analytics to see which got the best reactions. Because some markets want five second videos, one market, another market might want ten second videos. Now there might want 62nd videos, another might want three minute videos. You don't know until you try.

[00:08:57] But you can search for other videos in your market by putting your keywords in the search term, and then it will come up with top videos and you note how long they are all the top ones, and get an average of how long you should be making your videos. Sometimes a few seconds. Either way, make actually makes a difference. So that's length of videos. Now, all the people I've been studying have suggested that you study small creators in your niche because you can't compare yourself to someone that has 5 million followers. They can get away with murder and do whatever they want. And you try to do the same thing and you fail miserably. So it's best to follow people with smaller accounts that are having to do things correctly in your niche. Those are the ones you want to follow that are that are climbing and getting good views on their videos because they're doing it right or they have done some of the research for you. So don't compare yourself to super big accounts until you get super big. All right. And this is the one that's, you know, I'm really good at. I'm consistent my whole life, my whole business career, long before the Internet was I'm consistent. People know they can depend on me. And today that's becoming more and more rare, which means you you can beat people in your niche because they're not consistent. So every day since I started this, I've posted at least one TikTok, but most of the time it's at least three and I've done as many as nine in one day.

[00:10:36] And that day got enormous spikes in views and everything else. So but most of the creators that made it big told themselves, We're going to create every day. We're going to do these, by the way, these are shorter. So this doesn't take all day to to do this. I think I did spread it out all day for nine of them, but I still wasn't 8 hours straight working on them. You know, I did like one an hour and it maybe it took me ten, 15 minutes to complete each one. So 45 minutes of every hour was doing something else, you see. So it won't kill you to do this. But this is the fastest response and most number of views. This in this short of a period that I've ever had in YouTube and anything else. And my phone, I turned it on silent and it's still yelling at me, these jerks and this hidden jerk in this phone here. Let's see what's next. Q&a. You can let people ask you questions right on your profile page and it says Q&A, and they can click on it and send you a question directly. And you can answer them by either typing or answer them on video. It's a it's a cool feature that's available that should be available to you and that creates more engagement.

[00:11:59] All right. Here's something maybe I should have mentioned in the beginning. You got to be real careful picking your profile name. You can put keywords in it. And you can only change it once every seven days. You have two names. You got like the name of the account and then your handle kind of name. So I have that digital multimillionaire as my kind of handle, and then I have Tom Antion slash digital marketing, I think is the first one. So I have a keyword up up there. Now you need to have a hashtag strategy. Probably the first. Oh, I'm still doing it to this day because I have so many topic areas under the umbrella of digital marketing that I've made a big list of hashtags. You can research them right on your cell phone, right in TikTok, and then I write the hashtags down and put how many people have used the hashtags so that I know am I turned this on silent and the thing is still yapping at me. It gets easier because now I have the list so I don't have to take the time to develop the list. Every time I put a video out, I can go to my list and I say, Oh, that hashtag is good for this video. Put it in there and and I know how popular it is. Now.

[00:13:14] You don't want to go for the ones in the billions because you'll get lost in the shuffle. You usually want to when you're new. Start with the smaller numbers so that at least you get seen a little bit and you can grow your way up again. If you try to go for the gusto right off the bat, you'll fail miserably because there's other people that are way ahead of you and you're trying to compete with them. You have to grow this thing. And that doesn't mean that you can't have a you know, you might listen to this podcast start tomorrow and you do something crazy and you've got a video, gets a million views because every video stands alone. It's if if a creator has 5 million. Followers. They still have videos that flop if they don't take the time to do it correctly. So you have a good chance there. But still, don't shoot for that. Shoot for being consistent and keep putting out good stuff and you'll grow this thing for sure. And then, well, I've had some that go to more than 5000 views now. I had one that's 3300 views and then I had one go to 1500 views within a day, you know, so. So you've got a good chance as anybody, even if they have lots of followers. Now, another hashtag strategy is there's loads of misspellings that have enormous numbers of views. So don't feel bad about the think anybody's going to think poorly of you by using a misspelling in your hashtags and your description.

[00:14:43] A lot of them have more views than the real spelling of things. Oc You should just like I've been teaching you on YouTube for years. Use your keywords in what you say in the video because they use voice recognition to tell what you're saying and to help put your video in front of the right people. So say your keywords in the video. Now another feature that you have to earn your way to after 1000 followers is going live. So when you decide to go live, it tells all your followers and then you can go live. And that creates a lot of engagement too. So they like that. Let's see. Now I learned a kind of an advanced technique. I mean, there's no guarantees on any of these techniques because sometimes people have no hashtags and no description and they can get a million views. All right. If it's if the thing is crazy enough. But this particular technique has taken me a little bit longer to do the videos now just because of my fat fingers typing in the description. But the guy has a lot of statistics to back this up. And the big picture here is that TikTok is trying to grab search volume from Google because sort of younger people are searching on TikTok for stuff instead of Google. And of course, Google doesn't like this, but TicTok loves it.

[00:16:13] So what the technique is, is you type your keyword into Google. And you come down to the people also ask section and write down all those questions and you put those in your description of your video when it makes sense. You don't do stuff that's fake. You do things that match what the video is about. And I have been I have been without scientifically saying, you know, I've been getting probably 100 more views average than I was before I started doing that. I can't say for sure that that's why. But it certainly doesn't hurt because they give you 2200 characters. You used to be like a super short, like almost like a tweet, but now they jacked it up to 2200 characters. So I put the title of the thing that's got keywords in it. I put all the hashtags I can find, and then I put all these questions and then I put a web address for something that I sell or some way to get in touch with me and all in the description. So that's kind of a cool thing. And then most everybody says, especially in the beginning, answer every comment that you get. So that helps increase engagement and makes people feel like you're building a community and you care. You're not just not slopping stuff at them. So I've been doing that. Now one thing I haven't been doing consistently is everybody is saying you should go to other people in your niche and make nice, reasonable comments because you will show up and your handle will show up.

[00:17:52] And then people that are looking at that video can click over to you. So that's something I'm going to really start improving over the next week or so. Now, some other things now. I haven't done this yet either, but one thing is called a duet. A duet is where another video is playing and you are in a split screen reacting to it. Now, I'm not sure. I think there's some some fancy advanced ways that you can talk your reaction to the duet. But I think mostly it's like your expressions or you're pointing to something or doing that. It's a duet, and I believe that that will show up on their account. The person you're duetting with, which will help people see you and possibly come to your account. Now, again, I haven't done it yet myself, but I'm going to try to do one of those this week. The other thing is called a stitch. And stitch is where you can take 5 seconds of somebody else's video, play it, and then you can talk about that as long as you want. So that's a stitch as opposed to a duet. Now the effects that they have. One of them is called green screen. I mean, they have all the kinds of things where you can put bunny ears on yourself and which a witch hat and just all kinds of bizarre stuff.

[00:19:17] But green screen is one thing that I've harped against for years, because most people look like hell when they're doing it because they don't know how to do it properly. But now this green screen effect, you don't have to even have a green screen. They just have all these effects where you're you can be on top of a picture behind you or a video behind you or like I did one this morning where I was going to the vet real early. I did with me talking, but I'm pointing at the 6 a.m.. I had to get up or take off to the vet on. So it was dual camera effect front and back cameras. So whenever any of these social media is have a new feature and you use it, they give you a boost because they want you to to use these features and so they show you to more people. So that's effects. Now, another thing that I learned is that you can repost old stuff and with no penalty, and if you had something that went really well, you could repost it, You could put a different title on it, you can put different keywords, put the same video up there, you can shoot a new video about the same topic, you know, So there's no penalty for doing that on TikTok. Now, you wouldn't do it three of them in a row. You would do at least several days between the time you did it. And if you have a big following, then the new people coming in never saw that old one. And then the people's attention spans are so short they wouldn't remember seeing it anyway. So. So you can repost old stuff. Let's say another thing is as many people are watching without sound on, so it's good for you to put text on the screen and now you can edit. They'll transcribe the thing for you and then you can edit that transcription to make sure there's no weird words. They misinterpreted a word of yours and you can put the capitalization and the periods and things like that. It's good to have stuff showing on the screen that tells what the video is about and then they can turn the sound on if it looks really interesting to them. But if they just see you there and have no idea what the thing is about, chances of them actually watching are slim and they might. If you had a good description title that showed up the first couple of words of it so that they could see what the things about but having a text on moving stuff on the screen helps you considerably. Now let's see. Now, one of the psychologies of it is to put the outcome first. So an example of that would be. Let's say you showed a beautiful book cover and you say, Hey, how would you like to have a beautiful book cover like this for free? Well, that's the outcome.

[00:22:12] Well, let me show you how to do it in Canva, and then you go show them how to do it so you'll get a better watch time. And they're excited because they want what you showed them, because you showed them the outcome first. And then the other really critical part to that is, I mean, that's basically called a hook. And they say between one and 3 seconds, you better grab the person or they're gone no matter what you do after that. It really doesn't matter that much. Now, none of this applies if you're a hot bikini girl or something. I don't mean to be sexist, but I mean I mean, even some of them, the competition is so high, they're not getting a lot of views because, I mean, there's just so many of those people out there. So. So you got to do things correctly if you want to climb above the noise. But anyway, you got to hook them in the first couple of seconds. Then giving them a big benefit of what they're going to learn or some outrageous statement, things like that. And also everybody is saying, and now I haven't been good at this yet, and I'm going to try to see find out if there's any software that makes it easier. But they say that if you change the screen background every 2 to 3 seconds, most of the big creators, that's what they do to keep people really interested.

[00:23:29] So they can't they won't scroll away from you or swipe away. Let's see. Certain types of videos that go really good are like five tips to this or that or seven tips or the top ten things that so-and-so because people want to see the whole list. So those appear to to get you better watch time. There you go. So those are the things I'm working on on TikTok and it's paying off. I'm getting more and more views, more and more views, more and more likes, more and more follows. But it's like I said, it didn't just jump from 0 to 1000000. I'm still clawing away every day making these videos and and I can repurpose these videos. I'm concentrating on TikTok now, but I can repurpose them onto YouTube shorts and Instagram stories and reels and all that stuff. So you even get more bang for your buck out of these short vertical videos. All right. So thanks so much for the contribution to Patreon. It's really helping out those people with disabilities. And next week I'm going to report to you my first month on TikTok, the number of views and shares and followers and all that stuff. So check it out and click over to Patreon. screwthecommute.com/patreon so we can really help those people out with scholarships. All right. Catch you on the next episode. See you later.