Prompt Playbook: Tiktokification of Social Media PART 1
📱 Tiktokification of Social Media | AI Business Playbook
This week’s topic is all about the Tiktokification of social media.
What is it, what does it mean for our businesses and how best do we take advantage of it.
I’m drawing directly and unashamedly from Gary Vee’s new book "Day Trading Attention”. I definitely recommend you grab a copy if you are serious about building an online business - each page has gems.
I’ll be extracting some of the core lessons, making them directly actionable and adding in AI assistance to help you apply the ideas.
We’ll cover
Part 1: Tiktokification
Part 2: Formats and Topics
Part 3: How to produce at volume
Part 4: Native production
Part 5: Amplification of winners
Let’s get started
Tiktokification
Summary
Tiktokfication
what is Tiktokification?
social → interest graph
Tiktok’s algorithm
this isn’t just about Tiktok - it’s much wider
What is Tiktokification?
The way social media works is changing - and Tiktok is leading the way.
Regardless of your thoughts and feelings about Tiktok itself this is an important shift in social media and thus the ability of your business to reach customers.
Here’s a video intro if prefer to watch
Social media is a busy busy place. And because of that social media companies use algorithms to decide what we are shown.
Meta (then Facebook) pioneered the use of the social graph.
Your profile was connected to other profiles and pages by what you followed.
If I follow Nintendo on Facebook I'll be shown their content. Simple.
I’ll also be shown content from accounts that my friends follow. For example if a handful of my friends follow the account of a certain London based pub I’m more likely to be shown the pub’s content - even if I don’t directly follow the pub.
These recommendations are built on social links - who I follow and who the people I’m connected to follow. This is the social graph.
This has been the main way social media has worked for a decade plus.
It means that “growing an account” makes sense. As a business the larger my account the more followers I have. The more followers the more social connections - not just my followers but also their friends.
Therefore account growth becomes my goal as a business.
Tiktok has changed this.
Tiktok and the interest graph
Tiktok came along and and said “I don’t care how popular your account is and how many people follow you. I care about the content”.
Instead of showing you content from the people you and your friends follow Tiktok is showing you content based on your interests and what it thinks you most want to see.
It doesn’t care if that content is from a huge corporate account or a tiny account. Each piece of content is given a fair shake.
This is subtle but supremely important if you want to market your business online and make sales.
If I’m making sales on Youtube (for example) I need to build up an audience bit by bit over time and many content pieces. Each piece of content adds incrementally to my followers and thus my potential customer pool. It works - really well - but it takes concentrated time and effort.
On Tiktok I could start a new account, post once and that video goes to 3 million people.
Instantly turning around my business and becoming a major traffic channel.
Reach is democratised. It’s no longer the big get big and the small stay small.
This is because Tiktok assesses each piece of content on its own merits, one piece of content at a time. It’s not bothered about our past success. Which, if you are new to social media marketing, is extremely exciting.
How does the algo work?
Basically each time a piece of content is posted onto Tiktok a “sampling” process occurs. Let’s say I’ve just put out a video on my RISEN framework for AI prompting.
The video will immediately be shown to 200 people.
These people are not necessarily my followers but will be interested in the type of content I’ve created. Tiktok will check my caption, on screen text, hashtags and what I’m saying to try to “categorise” my content so it can show it to the right 200 people. If Tiktok doesn’t know what your content is about you are done for… More on this in Part4 as it’s super important!
Tiktok will then assess how those 200 people reacted to gauge whether the content is good enough to take to the next stage.
Tiktok will look at
how many people watched to the end
how many seconds watched on average
how many people immediately swiped away
comments and discussions
likes
shares
reposts
and much more!
In order to come up with a “score”.
People claim to know how this scoring algorithm works. It’s very unlikely that they’ve genuinely pinned it down - and if they have then the algorithm changes all the time anyway!
What is clear though is that Tiktok has some criteria to tell if your content is worth taking to the next level.
If not your content will stall in the dreaded “200 view jail”!
This is nothing personal. Tiktok hasn’t shadow-banned you or anything nefarious It’s just your content wasn’t good enough to pass the sampling process. Simple as that!
If it passes then Tiktok will show your content to 500 people and run all the same scoring checks.
If it fails here you’ll stall at 500.
If it passes Tiktok will go to 1000 and run its scoring. Then 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, 10,000 etc. etc.
Generally when you break this sort of threshold it’ll just keep going. Which is a great feeling! To the moooon!
And again all of this is entirely independent of your account size. You could have 6 followers (including your mum) and yet your video gets to 10 million views. This is the key to why this is important.
I don’t use Tiktok
This is important even if you don’t use Tiktok.
Because it’s the way other platforms are moving.
Facebook and Instagram Reels are now (recently) based on interest graph and not the social graph. Instagram Reels in particular are basically cribbing Tiktok’s model directly.
Youtube, especially Shorts, is also experimenting with this shift. And X (Twitter) is about to go all in on video and (it looks likely) will use the Tiktok model.
So regardless of your thoughts and opinions of Tiktok (and its legal fate in the US!) this is a wider phenomenon you need to pay attention to.
If you work this out now then you’ll be able to dominate on the other platforms when they shift to interest-based targeting. Imagine being able to become the person in your niche on LinkedIn for example. Powerful stuff.
This week
All this week I’ll show you how to take advantage of this tectonic shift so your business can be at the forefront.
If you are brand new to social media and have no following this is a major opportunity to carve put your space and dominate your niche. Even being able to take on incumbents who have millions of followers! That’ll matter less and less.
I’ll be showing you
how to build a content matrix particular to your platform of choice based on formats and topic that already work
how to use the matrix to spin out infinite content ideas
what tools to use to rapidly create content in high volumes - more content more “at bats”
how to leverage your organic wins into killer ads you know will have a positive ROI
If you are subscribed to the Premium newsletter I’ll see you tomorrow where we’ll build our organic content matrix.
Keep prompting,
Kyle