I Rigged the TikTok Algorithm To Make Me Go Viral

I discovered the tick tock

algorithm

in the last week. I went from zero to a hundred thousand followers and along the way I learned a lot more and interviewed a fellow tick tocker who really boosted what the

algorithm

saw in my videos. He reworked my strategy. It has worked. better than I ever thought it would be and I even use code to analyze 10,000 ticks and find averages, but let's start from the beginning, the world of technology is more than just phones and computers, so today much of the technology is completely intangible, purely software algorithms, the things that really run our lives, that's why I started this series to try to find out how these algorithms work, but a lot of people pointed out that correlation does not equal causation and simply analyzing The ticking on the page won't tell you.

I told myself how the algorithm works, so I had an idea. I have seven days from today to be as famous as possible and during these seven days I will be testing the conclusions I drew in the original video. This is how it's going to be. work, I've already filmed about half of the ticks I'm going to post, but overall I'll be posting 20 ticks over the course of the next seven days. I will limit myself mainly to technological content, but little by little they will do so. switch to algorithm related content until the last one where I will reveal that the audience has been part of an experiment all along, it will be our little secret until they find out that every day I am going to test my theories by using a control tick and two experimental posts, the check will be the first tic tac of each day without hashtags or music so it will just be an old video and then the second talk of each day will use hashtags related to the video as well as hashtag fyp and hashtag for you because, as you may remember, from the first video I found out that hashtags, even those, don't really have a big effect on whether your video gets promoted or not, so we'll be here. testing that and finally I will test the theory of sound.

The sound theory also emerged from the first video. It's just that having a famous sound in the background of your ticking will help you promote your posts better than using a custom sound. I'm not dancing tic tac or something where I can put a famous tic tac sound in the background, but there is a little trick to fool the algorithm into thinking that you are playing a famous tic tac sound in the background and then turn the volume down a little bit. little to zero, when the tic tac is released it will have a famous sound at the bottom and will be labeled under that sound, but you won't actually hear it in the video.

It's a strange trick, but I think it can help. The video of the day will be promoted each day. I've already edited the first three ticks, so I think it's time to publish them. Let's see how it goes. The ticking algorithm is more influential than almost any other piece of technology in the world. I've been covering technology on this channel for six years, but there's a reason I switched to covering this stuff. This is the technology that matters today. tic tac was by far the most downloaded app of 2020 and is run exclusively by an algorithm and with

tiktok

controlling much of our lives the algorithm is ultimately responsible for much of the thoughts and beliefs of the general public.

I don't think a society has ever relied so much on a single computer software most social networks twitter instagram and youtube for example, they have different outputs for their algorithm to go to the home tab, browse the suggested videos tabs, but For tick tock there is only one place on the 4u page and on the page for you, unlike youtube where you actually have to click on a video, the tick tock algorithm. can literally force you to watch something while you're scrolling, it's just the next video it decides to put in front of you, so not only is the tick tock algorithm ultimately the simplest in its goal, it's also the most powerful of everything you do in the app comes down to the algorithm as almost every video you watch is completely and artificially fed with what it thinks you would like to see and clearly the algorithm does a good job because as we said in latest video, the average tick tock user spends 52 minutes a day on the app longer than the attention span of a 16 year old, so an algorithm has immense control over the lives of a billion people .

You see why this is important, but let's see how my account has done. Four day update. It's 7 30. p.m. on Wednesday, January 27, I published my first video on Saturday, January 23 at 1:00 p.m. with zero followers and now we have 71,000 followers and 1.3 million likes, for one that's definitely more likes and followers than I've ever gotten on youtube and I've been doing that for 495 times longer, but there's a reason why The tick toc algorithm is much simpler as we just talked about, so views and likes from followers mean something completely different, but let's take a look at what worked best on my most viewed views. tick tock was this one about Apple going backwards, which has 2.8 million views, more than double the view count of my entire YouTube channel and it's been two days, but as expected, that was actually the third tick tock of the day with a famous sound in the background. at zero volume of course, but hashtags don't seem to help that much.

The difference between videos with hashtags and videos without hashtags is negligible, but it is clear that famous sounds have seriously helped my publication and, honestly, it has performed better than me. I ever thought that the average likes on a post with a famous sound so far has been a ridiculous 237,100. Well, the average likes for a video without a famous sound has been only eight hundred and forty and now that I say it out loud high to say only fifteen thousand likes sounds absurd to me but compared to others that is nothing so yesterday at noon with all the crazy success I had been having I decided to change the plan a little I am going to publish all my posts from now on exclusively with a famous sound in the background, I mean, we have seen that it clearly works and there is nothing to lose since ultimately the real goal is to get as big as possible in these seven days and I think that is more or less the case closed but I will continue to test the hashtag theory by alternating videos with hashtags and videos without just making sure there really is no difference and honestly I was feeling very good and very confident in my plan at the moment until this happened in my video. was under review, my rapid growth, combined with the fact that I was uploading videos through my camera roll, made it suspicious that they were not original, so they blocked me from posting for a while, basically, I was growing so fast that They thought I was using bots. but finally this video was posted, but I haven't posted since then, so I hope my next posts don't have the same problem.

Worst case scenario, they deemed my account fake and I won't be able to upload again for the rest of this experiment. I guess we'll have to see what happens and I'll talk to you on day six, regardless of any hiccups with the videos being removed. I think it's pretty clear at this point that things have been working out and it opened up the possibility of maybe being able to reach a hundred thousand followers in a week, but it was going to be close, so I decided to talk to a creator who was absolutely excited about the ticking and that, like me, is doing it without making a single trend, its name is justice. pastor, here it is, I don't know if you even know the answer to this, but why do you think your tic tacs have been successful?

The main reason is because when people see a problem and think they can solve it, they are tuned in and want to see everything and see if they can do it. You know in their head it's something as satisfying as seeing if you can get the answer, so I think the watch time of those people who see everything really increased. what the algorithm saw my videos on, choose something you're passionate about, focus on that and grab the user's attention in the first three seconds, because if you don't, someone else will usually play long videos, like 60 second videos, which the people are not going to see.

Watch it, so I would suggest keeping it no longer than 40 seconds. I think all the

viral

videos I've posted were no longer than 40 seconds. 40 seconds was like the cut had to tick tock in that goldilocks zone for 20 to 40 seconds. or average length or at least I thought let's see how my account has been doing now well it's day 7 and some things happened first here is the update of the videos that are being reviewed it still happens and it has gotten worse it started to improve and the videos It only took us a few minutes to be reviewed, but then for some reason tick-tock decided to remove one of my videos due to illegal activities and regulated goods.

It turned out to be a video about the tick-tock algorithm, so maybe they thought it also said I don't know much, but I decided to post the video again and now it's back up without any problems, but let's get to the reason you're here, follow date, we are about to surpass 90,000 followers and I have 1.6 million likes and I have five hours left in the challenge. I also changed my content to

make

more algorithm-focused videos, which turned out a little worse than the consumer tech related videos I was making before, so the growth has slowed a bit, but it taught me a lesson, as I quickly realized that the audience on TikTok was not the same as my audience on YouTube.

You guys may be more interested in social media algorithms and content creation, but literal nine-year-olds. of tik-tok are more interested in tic tac where they can argue about Apple versus Android in the comments section and that's not to take issue with tic tac, there are a lot of smart people on the app but that general demographic explains why the Educational content tends to not do very well on tick tock and drama tends to do much better now. I've never made content that came close to drama, but the video that worked best for me was about controversial rumors about Apple, so even though it wasn't what would normally appear in tick-tock room it generated a lot of conversations and comments, which is what which you want on tik-tok more than anywhere else, but let's get to a quick update on the hashtags, not much has changed, but I have to go because I have one more final tick. to film, so we'll see you when the experiment finally ends, so things seem to be going well on that front, but this video wouldn't be complete without a deep dive into the analytics.

In the first video, I took a look at 100 tick tac. today we've stepped up, we've looked at more tick tocks of the views this video is likely to get, although maybe you could change that, hit the like button below for the YouTube algorithm and we've chosen not a thousand or five thousand, but a tick tock It was just ten thousand ticks analyzed and let me show you what I found, so of the first 10,000 ticks that appear on the page for you when I log out without preferences I found that 79.2 percent of the videos on the page for ti your page had hashtags, not surprising given the popularity of the infamous fyp hashtag, but when looking at the average likes, a video without hashtags has an average of 718,423, while a video with hashtags has an average of 547 1,252 now, of course, I'm not saying that adding Hashtags are going to hurt your posts, but as we've covered before, there's very little evidence that hashtags help your posts, but there was also tons of other interesting data, like how 16.5 of all the people on the forum page were verified out of the 10,000 tick tocks charlie dimiglio appeared zero times and there were also a bunch of other stats, like how the original sounds compare to the famous sounds in the background, where This data did not agree with my last video, in fact, this data showed that videos with original sounds tended to get more likes, which goes against a fundamental belief of ticking, but according to my own evidence and the evidence Of many others, one may simply be an element of statistical randomness and it is possible that this data was simply leaning the other way, but I don't know and I have linked the 10,000 ticks of data in the description.

Have fun with it, but let's take a moment to look at the final results of my seven-day experiment. 100,000 we reach 100,000. Okay, actually we've done it. I ended up with 99k, but by the time this video comes out we'll be at 100 and did you ever hear rounding I thought, so this is what I learned first of all, I learned before I even started this that the algorithm needs individual videos. I don't like series, I'm sure the second part is great, but you should be able to watch any of the parts and understand it like in the office.

You could probably start on a random episode of season six without ever having seen the show before and be fine, but on a show. like stranger things starting in season 2 doesn't

make

any sense so ticking the videos must work fine on their own i know becauseNot only is that what I did but that's what I didn't do a while ago. For fun I tried to upload a condensed version of one of my old videos to YouTube in six parts and no one watched it because you couldn't watch each video alone and the algorithm doesn't like that because the way the tick is constructed it only shows you are a video from only one creator at a time, but I also learned that the tick tock algorithm likes things that are different.

It may not have made any trends, but that's all, it's different. I was the only one to film tick tock with a good camera. informative videos and I keep stirring the pot with a bit of controversial rumors about Apple, it didn't matter that what I was doing wasn't popular, doing what's popular is a myth, why would anyone watch your content if all you're doing is what everyone else? is doing the fact that I made something so unique to

tiktok

completely ignoring trends was what the algorithm liked the most, it didn't matter that I didn't really follow the video length data I found or that I didn't use a famous sound when I started, it's Only he was doing something no one had seen before.

Think of the algorithm as a person. This person just wants to be entertained so they are going to watch some of the videos with trends and dances but eventually they will get bored so they will want to change things up and right now tic tac, more than any other platform, is full of scams and copycats, so doing something new will change things for the algorithm that the algorithm is looking for. recommending new content feels like everyone is fed up with the app's top influencers lacking originality, and since the algorithm's ultimate goal is simply to keep people on the app for as long as possible, you want new things to show them. everyone that I needed this. week and it needs you, let's change the tick tock for the better, starting with a like on this video and maybe a subscription too because we are going to dive into much more in the world of technology than just algorithms, but every day these algorithms take up more . and more of our lives and it is more evident nowhere else than the ticking and if the algorithm is going to take over our lives feeding content day after day, let's give it good content, defeat us, I have to go back to tiktok and continue the routine and as always see you next time