678 – The latest stats from the TikTok experiment: Tom talks 28 Days on TikTok

Episode 678 – 28 Days On TikTok
[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 678 of Screw the Commute Podcast. Today, we're going to talk about my first 28 days on TikTok. So far, I have not been kidnapped and put into child slavery. All right. I don't think they want me because I eat too much. Right. So far, I don't think I've had any identity theft. So I don't really know the bad stuff behind the scenes. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to take advantage of using the system and get the most out of it that I can before they get me. How about that? And by the way, I'm not an expert on this. We're talking about six weeks of me paying attention to TikTok. Two weeks of study and four weeks basically, of being on. I still have a lot to learn. And this is kind of like all of these other things. They all have minute details and they change rapidly. That's why you need some fanatic like me to help you keep up with this stuff, Right? All right. So this is episode 678. Hope you didn't miss episode 677. That was Brett Ridgeway. He's a long time veteran of the speaking industry, especially handling back of the room sales. He's handled over 150 events where he's seen speakers sell at the back of the room and how they handle things. So a really great episode there. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number that was 677. All right. We want to thank the folks helping out with Patreon. You know, we give you a lot of training here for free. I mean, really $1,000,000 worth of training and if you like just our training episodes as opposed to our interviews, you can go to screwthecommute.com/training. There's over 300 training episodes there with just me or me and people on my staff teaching you stuff for free. So take advantage of it. But we would love to have your help with Patreon because all the money from the Patreon less the patron fees is going to fund our scholarship program for persons with disabilities. So I'm not taking any of the money for myself. All right. And also, make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's screwthecommute.com/app.

[00:02:56] Okey Dokey, let's give you a little recap and we're getting into the main event here. So. About six weeks ago, I took two advanced courses on TikTok, covered about two weeks, part time taking notes. I watched probably 100 YouTube videos. I tried to watch only ones that were very current within the past year or within the past few months because things change so fast.

[00:03:26] And I had 11 followers, which is kind of crazy because I never did anything on Tik Tok and I've actually been seeing this. It's kind of strange. People will follow me and I'll go to see who they are and they've got 180 followers, but no content rights or something crazy like that. So I'm not sure what that's all about. All right. I did my first Tik Tok video on October 29th. And I released my first five of them. That day I hear something. Either a crow or something must have got in my chimney. It's really loud behind me, and I had 11 followers before I put up any videos, and I made comments on four or five other videos. By the way, that's one thing I've been lax on. You're supposed to be commenting on other people in your niche to get exposure for you, and I have been pitiful at that. So I'm going to try to improve that this month. Let's see now. I sent an email out to my list, but I used the wrong link in it, so I basically got nothing from sending out 100,000 emails. So virtually all of what I've gotten on Tik Tok is from I mean minor percentage of people that know me, but it's all new stuff. So don't think just because of who I am and my, you know, long reputation and big email list that it had anything to do with what I've done on Tik tok.

[00:04:56] I mean it did a little tiny bit, but you could start with nothing and be successful in there if you play the game right. And I played it hard, pretty darn hard for as busy as I am. All right, so here we go. So as of today, this is the morning of November 28th. So about 28 days, I had a total number of videos of 106. Now, remember, they're really short. I'll show you the longest in the shortest ones in the average in a minute, but 106 videos. I had 407 followers. Now a thousand is the magic number you're shooting for is your first really, really benchmark where you can go live. And it's kind of good because you don't want to go live to nobody. So if you have 1000 visitors, you'll probably get somebody to see it live. Total video views. This kind of floored me. 76,762. This is crazy, folks. I've been on, you know, YouTube and I mean all the other Vimeo and all the places that and I'm on Roku TV and all the things. This is just crazy to be able to get 76,000 views in in 128 day period on a from starting from nothing. All right. So that's pretty wild. I had 1282 profile views. Now, the reason this is not as great, this could have been great if I had 1000 followers or if I'm not positive about this yet.

[00:06:41] But once you get 1000 followers on a business account, you can have a clickable link in your bio. Well, if it's not clickable now, I have a link in my bio and 1282 people went over and looked at it, but only a few actually typed it in and went over to see all my stuff that I have available. So this is a big milestone when you can get that clickable link. And I think you either have to get your business completely registered, which just yesterday I had to send in my corporate papers and stuff like that because I did see a guy, a lawyer that has only 282 followers and has a clickable link in his bio. So I think it's because he fully registered and proved that he was a real business. So I'm hoping that happens. But I'm going to get that 1000 hopefully next month one way or the other. But that so those profile views weren't as valuable as they could have been because it could have taken people to buy stuff and to see all my other stuff. I had 537 shares, so people liked the stuff enough to share. I don't know how many saves I've had. I don't see where you can find that in the analytics. Each video you can find it on, but so I don't know. And so some people have saved a bunch of my videos, some people haven't.

[00:08:07] Comments. I've had 336 and likes. I've had 7131. That's all of this morning. Och now the most views on one video as of this morning, which kind of freaks me out that and I'm calling this viral even though it's not like a million, but I believe I set myself a a benchmark of calling something viral for a brand new account. And so I set a benchmark at 2000 views or more. I'll call that viral if you're brand new. That's pretty darn good. So the one video I have. Has, as of this morning, 39,900 views. It just freaks me out. The other ones that I had. Three other ones out of the 106 were 5550 3344 and 2234. So out of the 106 videos, four of them I'm claiming went viral and some are still going, you know. Another thing about this is that older videos still get views as people start binge watching your content in this particular thing. Now, the least views I had on a video was 16, and that amazes me because that's my hobbies. Tax deductible. A thing I've been teaching for years. And one other pitiful one was my first duet. And that's where somebody else's videos there. And I'm just sitting there reacting to it that only had 41. Average is between 150 to 600 views, but all of them keep increasing. And I said because the older ones are seen when somebody binge watches and starts seeing older stuff.

[00:10:05] And that's another big thing about Tik Tok is that your old stuff can be really, really powerful. I've had some of the people I've studied under say that they had one a year or two years later just go massively viral. So that's a that's a good thing. The most videos I made in one well, and by the way, 150 to 600 average views, again, is crazy for a beginner. I mean, you go on YouTube, you can just go for a year and not get that so really powerful. Now the the most videos I made in one day was nine that's and now I'm making them a little better quality and doing more things that I learned And so I don't do as many per day now. But then the last videos I made in a day is one and I haven't missed any days at all. I've that's another thing. Consistency is really important. All right. The longest video was 2 minutes and 59 seconds and the shortest one. Listen to this is 5 seconds. Okay. So. So this doesn't have to kill you, but it is a learning curve on it for sure. And as far as I know, I made 300 bucks from a sale of a copywriting course, you know, So the numbers have to be really big and the right topics. And and like I said, when I get that profile link, that will be a big milestone that I'll probably sell more stuff because people can just click instead of have to type stuff in with their fingers.

[00:11:42] Okay, so what did I learn from all this? Well, here's some miscellaneous stuff that I learned. The app can glitch on you, and a lot of times I had to save and close the app and open it back up and sometimes the sound would quit and I'd have to close everything, open it back up and it's back. So that happened. I won't say frequently, but you know, it would freak you out if you think, Oh, I lost everything when you really didn't. I found that the time of day matters more of when you release your video in the short run to get immediate results because of something that all the social media things do is called micro tests. They in the first hour, they want to see if people were reacting to your video before they show it to more people. If nobody reacts to it, then they're not going to show it to more people. So that means you need to to release it when more people are on. And after you get a bunch of videos out there, you'll you can go into your analytics and see the peak times when people are on, and that's when you want to release your videos or maybe an hour or so before the peak times.

[00:12:56] Och, and that's in the short run. But see, the long run is not as important for that because the the fact that older videos can take off like I just said. So if you just want to slam up a bunch of content, that's great. And but you've got to shoot for the long haul with those ones, they probably won't do as good as the short run. Och, I found that it's harder to get comments than likes. It's easy to smash the little heart button and move on then to stop and type a comment in. But all of them are valuable to you. And I also found that it's way harder to get followers than in the past. Yeah, it's possible for outrageous content to get a bunch of followers right away or celebrity status. But here's the thing. Even the really super hot girls that used to be able to just take off like crazy, many of them are struggling because there's so darn many of them. They think all they have to do is wear bikini or be provocative. And some of them have very few views because there's just so many people trying to do that kind of stuff and not really technically give any value. I guess that would be called entertainment value. So I told you, I can't go live until I get 1000 followers. And but that's probably a good thing. Don't have the clickable link in the bio yet.

[00:14:22] I'm trying to learn how to get that either 1000 followers or I'm thinking that maybe if I just get the business fully registered with Tik Tok that I can get that link before that. That's really going to important to me. It's good to use both the desktop and mobile apps because it's so much easier to do stuff on the desktop to check things and retell, you know, typing comments and respond to things. But the thing has to run off of your cell phone or your tablet. That's where it's supposed to work from. Now, I've only used a video editor that's included in the TikTok app. Now there are others I haven't used yet. One popular one that I'm going to look into this month is called Cap Cut, Cap cute. And it's owned by the same company as Tik Tok. So it has more features than the one that's standard with TikTok. But, you know, I'm doing a lot of cool stuff with just the standard one and I don't have to import and export. I can just immediately post stuff. I think cabinet can do that too, since it's owned by the same company, but I haven't figured that out yet. But you can do a lot of cool stuff. And the learning curve, I mean, it took, you know, 30, 40, 50 videos just to get the hang of the thing to work faster. And still I haven't used all the features so, so och there's a funny thing.

[00:15:50] Well again, consistency is most important. So if you can do one video a day, I mean, remember folks are only 3 minutes maximum and a lot of them are ten and 15 seconds, you know, So you can do this if you really want to, but that's better than doing one a week or one three of them one day and wait two weeks and do another three. That'll never get you anywhere. Consistency is important. Now, here's a crazy thing. I got my ad account, so I was thinking, I'm going to do this all organically for the first month, and then I'm going to look into doing some ads to get more followers and get more reach. Well, I go to do that and my ad account is suspended and I never even placed an ad before. So so apparently I signed up for it a year ago or something and never did anything. And then they I opened it up and it says account permanently suspended for lack of use. So so I did an appeal process and they asked me to send in the corporate papers and stuff. So I think that's going to be fine. All right. So some tips on the videos that I learned. Of course, you got to shoot vertical for this. You should use some of their effects. So they have a green screen thing that I covered in a previous TikTok episode here.

[00:17:12] And they like when you use their new features, you know, they kind of give you a boost for that. You absolutely must get good at hooks in the first 1 to 3 seconds. I mean, people scroll lightning fast on this. If you don't grab them, they're gone. It's good to show your credibility at the beginning. It helps people feel like you're worth watching. And this is an important thing because the completion rates of your video are important to make. Make TikTok show your videos to more people. Now mine isn't that great, but you have to improve your storytelling to increase like curiosity so people hang in to the end to see what happened. Let's see. Yeah. And for instance, on the hook stuff. And the credibility. Well, I might say if it's an email marketing video, I might say I've sent out over a billion emails, so I know what I'm talking about here. Check this out. You know, so something that shows that, hey, this guy, you know, has been around knows what he's talking about. Now, another thing that TikTok watches for is the number of followers you get after particular video. They really like that. If you get a lot of followers, they think that video must have been pretty good. They'll show it to more people. And they also watch the total watch time. Look at this, folks. Just on that one video that got 39,000 views.

[00:18:41] The total watch time just for that video was 267.5 hours. All right. So they're loving that and they're keeping showing that more. So by the time I get done recording this, I might be over 40,000 instead of 39,100. They just keep showing it to more people. And I'm doing this early in the morning, you know, as it goes out through the day, I'm absolutely sure that one's going to exceed 40,000 and start heading towards 40 to 43000 or more. And it keeps going as long as peop people see it and like it or comment on it, it just they're going to just keep showing it to more people and there's plenty of people out there to show it, too. All right. You want to cut out the dead space and don't leave long things talk fast because sometimes people will watch it again to catch what they missed. So talk fast. Some videos that go good or like five tips to something or seven ways to do this, or the number one tool I use to do something or other. So those things go good. There's loads of other kind of hooks. And then my thoughts overall is I'm going to keep up with this and I'll report back in about a month. I mean, many people that I've been studying said that the second month is when they blew up because you kind of prove to your to Tik tok that you're real and you're consistent and you're worthwhile to show to more people because you're keeping putting out content.

[00:20:14] See, all the social media want you to be on there longer. And so if you're consistently putting out videos that people are watching and liking and engaging with, everybody is staying on their their thing longer and they can charge more for ads. That's pretty much the bottom line on all the social media. I'm not sure that since December is coming up if that's going to be good or not as my second month, because people are shopping and doing other stuff, but they're taking vacations from work too, so they might be on more lawn. I really don't know what's going to happen in December. I'm going to keep up my pace and I encourage you to check me out. It's at. Digital Multimillionaire is my handle on there. So if you do check me out, please comment like, you know, there's 106. Well, by the time you hear this, maybe 110 or more and keep going, I'm going to be putting several per day up on forever and see how it goes. So check it out. And we thank you. And also kick in to the Patreon at screwthecommute.com/patreon. See, I'm doing all this work so you don't have to. All right. Okay. We'll catch you all the next episode. See you later.