Tips For Operating TikTok From Foreign Digital Marketing Experts

Corbin is a digital marketing expert from the United States. With many years of digital marketing experience, he has long seen the huge commercial value contained in TikTok.

Like many Americans, Corbin is a home DIY enthusiast. During the epidemic, after moving into his new home, he began to try to film his home DIY experiences and post them on TikTok. At first, Corbyn didn’t have high expectations. In the first few days, Corbyn’s videos were lackluster. On Sunday, his tenth video went viral, racking up millions of views in just one day.

Currently, Corbyn's account, which records personal hobbies, has accumulated 340,000 followers and 4 million likes.

As a professional digital marketing consultant, Corbin has seen the huge communication potential of TikTok. Naturally, I started to use TikTok as a traffic channel and customer acquisition channel to promote my own business: digital online marketing and operation services.

Corbin generously shared the methodologies and tips he learned from his experience running TK.

He said, "You have to know why TikTok is such a powerful tool. Even if you don't have any fans, you can still compete with millions of fans."

The reason is simple. Any operator who has a little knowledge of short video platforms such as TK and Douyin knows that the distribution of recommended traffic on the TikTok platform is algorithm-driven and has little correlation with the fan base.

“Content planning and production is the most troublesome part,” he said. Corbin gives several very practical content and creative planning strategies.

The first content planning tip is to use Answer the public (). Enter product or category keywords and let the system provide a list of related topics in this field.

Then according to the topics given by the system and combined with your own thinking, select some topics that can arouse the audience's interest and attention as creative directions.

His second tip is also a commonly used tip for Douyin operators in China: research all competing accounts and content in your own category, dismantle, study and learn from them. Enter category keywords in the search box, collect existing popular content in this category, dismantle, analyze, and imitate shooting and production.

Additionally, Corbin recommends using filters to select content that has been popular recently. By filtering time indicators, we can find out the content themes that are more concerned and favored by TK audiences at the current time point.

Zhang Qi, a phenomenon-level IP in the business knowledge category that will become popular on the entire Internet in 2022, once described this methodology in detail. Zhang Qi's personal appeal and expressiveness are one aspect, and another important factor in his success lies in his in-depth research and insight into the content and subject matter.

Zhang Qi and his blogger management team will collect and dismantle content topics from content creators in the same track on short videos and other content platforms. Based on accurate user portraits, all topics that Chinese small business owners are interested in are collected and compared across the entire network. The finalized list of topics has been verified and will definitely attract the targeted audience.

After the topic is determined, the presentation and structure of the video itself are the key to whether the video becomes popular. What our domestic Douyin operations call the golden three seconds is called HOOK by overseas operations. Foreign TK operators also agree that the hook (golden three seconds) is the most important variable in determining video data performance. Corbin lists several types of hooks that are very useful.

·Listhooks (issue list hooks)

For example: 5 things you don’t know about TikTok operations?

·Howto (how to question hook)

For example: How to make your first thousand dollars with affiliate marketing?

How to get the 1,000th TK fan?

·Reason why (what causes)

For example: This is why your TK account cannot grow

·Curiosity hook Curiosity hook

For example: I really can’t believe no one talks about this issue

As for the video duration range, Corbin’s view is the same as that of many domestic Douyin operators. The length of the video is not important. As a TK operator, you only need to focus on strong hooks that make the audience stop watching, and the total time the audience spends watching your video.

The perceptions of overseas TK practitioners and domestic Douyin content practitioners are becoming increasingly consistent. Why focus on hooks and duration? The arguments given by Corbin have similar views in China, because the logic of platform traffic allocation is based on the optimization of platform interests. The demands of platforms such as TK or Douyin are longer user usage time and more users. The length of user usage and the number of users determine the monetization capability and commercial value of the platform itself.

Once we know the platform’s demands, we can deduce two key indicators that determine traffic distribution: average duration and sharing rate. The average duration indicator is the platform's measure of how long your video can lock users into the platform; while the sharing rate indicator means how many new users your content can import from the outside or how many existing users it can activate.

Different platforms in the domestic mobile Internet ecosystem are relatively fragmented. We all know that we cannot directly share Douyin videos to other platforms such as WeChat. In the overseas Internet ecosystem where all platforms are connected to each other, the sharing rate is an indicator that the TK platform attaches particular importance to.

Corbyn used the content performance of his own account to demonstrate the importance of these two indicators.

He started by selecting a video that had a mediocre performance (84,000 views).

Two indicators of this video: the share rate is 254 times; the average length is 28%. It can be seen from the source of video traffic that most of it comes from attention traffic rather than system recommendation traffic.

The two not-so-pretty indicator data determine that the platform will not push the video to the larger FOR YOU recommendation traffic pool.

Corbin found another hit video with tens of millions of dollars for comparison. The average viewing time of this video is close to 50%, and a large amount of traffic comes from FOR YOU referral traffic.

Corbin added that from his own operating experience, if the average viewing time can be close to or exceed 50%, the video will most likely explode.

Of course, experienced TK operators all know that TikTok traffic distribution is also uncontrollable. Even similar videos (same creativity, same structure and similar presentation) will perform very differently.

Domestic Douyin operations mostly use the account matrix strategy to use enough volume to deal with the uncertainty caused by probability.

Is there any problem that cannot be solved?

A team of one person like Corbin can make money on TikTok, and we Chinese sellers will definitely be able to take advantage of TikTok to unlock new growth possibilities!