The TikTok Playbook for B2B Growth: Go viral with video

I have gone viral on TikTok before - running a 1 month TikTok growth experiment, and going from 0 to 4.4M views and 10.2K followers. However, this was mostly from one clip and I did not find a consistent process to do this over and over again.

So, over Easter weekend I ran some experiments with short form on TikTok. I brought my girlfriend Magdalena along for the ride - and we grew an account to 120K views in a few days..

A TikTok Growth Experiment - How to go viral in a few days with consistency

Here are some (13) learnings to copy:

Don’t use English language if you are in Sweden - it immediately makes your content less relevant for the crowd that will see your content.

Targeting a different region or geography on TikTok

IF your ideal viewer is in another geography - you are in for some trouble - as it is a quite a complex way to push content to a different region.

I have experimented some with this - targeting the US. from Sweden.

Proxies, VPN, etc. do NOT work.

The only reliable way is to get a local sim card (as TikTok uses this - together with IP and a bunch of other stuff to decide your location and where to push your content).

You should also have a separate phone for this that has GPS and everything turned off. You cannot log in to your account from another phone, and you should ideally create a new account from this phone.

You want things to be clear and look clean - but not too professional.

Clear audio is really important - so consider pluggin an external microphone in to your iPhone.

The same goes for text and graphics. Don't go crazy try to over edit - just use the native fonts and people will feel your content is relatable.

Try to be consistent with the style you choose though - so people recognize your content on their For You page.

Being responsive and sparking conversation boosts growth and builds loyal fans. One-way communication is out - people want to connect, interact, and feel involved.

You don't want to spend time producing content to an audience that is not there, or is not interested. Make sure to validate before you get started.

Hint: validate by looking at other creators in the space - the size of their channels and how niched their content is. Do they always talk about the same topics and do it in the same format?

Do this by A. using TT analytics and B. manually checking out all the accounts of new likes/comments/followers.

This way you naturally get a feel for your target group - and can refine your ideal viewer persona.

Music, captions, colouring - it all matters. If you don't spark emotions you're out. You can either produce content that is A. aspirational, B. controversial, or C. relatable. Or all three.

Don't think of captions like subtitles. Too many people think they need to match every word.

Rather try to make captions a bit different. Tell the same story but in a slightly different way and you will provide a reason to re-watch and give your audience twice the value.

Remember - some people will watch your content muted - only reading captions + seeing the video, and some will focus more on the audio. You want to cater to all of these.

Write your scripts

like this

So it's easy to go through it when you record. Don't write out every word so you sound like a robot. However, write out most of the content to avoid rambling.

If you tailor your words to fun trends or pick up on slang you can make it hyper relevant to the TT crowd and make certain sub-niches feel special. For example, "booktok" is not even something most people outside of TikTok know of - but will be relevant to people active in that community.

Don't just sit and present in a boring way.

Do something while you talk, take the viewers on a mission - give multiple payoffs to continue watching. Try to tell several stories at once.

Creators like MrBeast are pros at this - where they have A. a gameshow going on where 10 people compete in 5 sequential levels with a high stake cash prize on the table, while at the same time B. have a one crew running an ongoing mission "in real time" to find the secret location of the gameshow with a helicopter, before it's over.

If you should choose on KPI - go for average watch time. If you master the skill of keeping people watching your content - you will have mastered the video game - as TikTok, Youtube and all the video platforms have this as a huge factor in deciding what videos to push.

Once you see avg. watch time go up, the more views you get - your video is locked in to fly.

Ps. often TikTok starts out pushing your video towards a subniche of a few hundered people - to find who they should push your video to. But you need to make it over some magic threshold, or it will get stuck in the infamous "200 views jail" and no

Average watch time is key to have your videos go viral. But what's then some benchmarks to aim for?

Here are some benchmarks for ok, good, and great average watch times for short form video and TikTok.

Average watch time vs. rating - What's an OK, good and avg. watch time for short videos?

Also overall length matters - if you get >100% watch time things will get interesting.

OK, let's go in to some mistakes to avoid - if you want to go viral..

And some (2) mistakes I did in my experiment:

In 1 video I accidentally had too high volume on the background music. This takes away from the talking and reduced watch time - and even got some comment mentioning this.

Time on the day matters. Despite crazy initial retention on 1 video - as I published it too late at night, it ended up being 1AM and the target viewer persona went to sleep.

It picked up somewhat in the morning, but didn’t go off.

This excites me as this is not a one grand-slam viral clip. Rather it’s a reliable and repeatable playbook - where I know each new video from now on will get ~10K views, with consistently high avg. watch time per video. Starting with 0 followers - that’s pretty cool growth, and depending on your target group can be one of the fastest way to GTM.. I’m now working on a sharable Notion of my playbook for short-form video and next target 1M views in 1 month.

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