Down the Rabbit Hole: My Experience Going Viral on TikTok
TLDR; TikTok is weird, but I love it.
I have been on TikTok since late September or early October (what is time really?). I initially started as an interested researcher who knew many of my communities were there. Things sort of spiraled from there.
To be fair, I’m still an interested researcher. I think there’s a lot of cool stuff happening on this platform and I’m still very much incorporating it into the work I’m doing this year. But this has definitely taken on an in-group, auto-ethnographic feel to the work.
For those that don’t know, TikTok is a video-based platform. All the videos are less than 1 minute long, but content basically only limited by the imagination. There is a huge bank of music available and some rudimentary video editing within the app itself. People upload content which is then sorted and presented to different viewers on the “For You Page.”
For me, who has mastered more text-based platforms like Twitter, it did take a bit of getting used to. However, I quickly got myself sorted into some communities and actually found the experience much safer (if that’s the right word) than Twitter. Partially because of the communities I was interested in, I found people to be mostly kind and friendly and the comments mostly tame. Coming from a place where I’m never sure I’m going to set off the trolls (on Twitter), this was a breath of fresh air.
I quickly found lots of cool communities within TikTok that I enjoyed the content from. For example: Indigenous TikTok, LGBTQ+ TikTok, BookTok, and kDrama TikTok. This has actually led to whole new discovery about my own self as a person and my interests, but that’s a blog post for another day.
Almost as soon as I got oriented, I started trying out content creation (because I’m impulsive and can’t leave well enough alone). The thing is, once I started creating content, I couldn’t stop. It was fun. I got deeper into my now “core communities” and learned different genres of videos. I then realized I wanted higher quality video, so I invested in better recording equipment and taught myself the new version of Adobe (it has amazingly not changed a ton since I was editing things over a decade ago). According to my spreadsheet of videos (that I created yesterday, don’t ask) I have now posted over 150 videos since the beginning of October.
So what happened with those videos? This is not going to be a post about speculating how the algorithm works. I have some theories, but all half-baked and not ready for the internet yet. But I can tell you what it feels like to have content get thousands of views.
Here’s some number break downs:
- Videos with over 1,000 views: 36
- Videos with over 5,000 views: 9
- Videos with over 10,000 views: 4
- Videos with over 100,000 views: 1
My first video that really “took off” was a silly little political video that found itself onto conservative TikTok and apparently irritated some people. It had been up for several days and I had already forgotten about it. All of the sudden my notifications were blowing up and I was getting some harassment in the comments. That video suddenly had over 9,000 views overnight. As most of my content was decidedly not that kind of political, it was weird having it be my most viewed video. Luckily, it didn’t hold that title for long. [Side note: this experience was definitely a one-off. I have since only had positive experiences and interactions. Even in debating with people, it has remained civil.]
I have had some trouble adjusting to the way time works in TikTok compared to other social media. If I post something on Twitter and people don’t see it relatively immediately, then it’ll never get seen. TikTok is a bit different in that it sometimes takes a little while for content to make its way to the For You Page. Like the video mentioned above, it had gotten maybe 50 views until all of the sudden it was blowing up my phone 5 days later.
There are also patterns to how videos get viewed. Some will get a couple hundred views in the first few hours of being posted and then never get viewed again (unless someone goes to your page and finds it, but that doesn’t happen too often from what I can tell from my analytics). Most of my videos have between 100 and 200 views in this way.
However, I have had those few times where a video has taken off and I have no idea why this happens. I have a couple videos from over a week ago that are still going, kind of like a slow burn. So, basically, you never know. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why videos do well — I make amazing videos of course. But what I don’t understand is why only some of them do well and others only get 100 views. And when something takes off, it surprises me every single time.
As an example, here’s my first video that got over 10,000 views. It still gets views on occasion.
So, when a video I posted on a whim last Saturday night started getting views almost immediately, I was both surprised and not surprised at all. However, the rate at which notifications were coming in and the amount of engagement definitely felt different. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to be a wild ride.
Sure enough, by the 12-hour mark, the video had over 19,000 views and was still going strong. At 24 hours, over 47,000 views. Let me tell you, by the time the numbers were that high, they basically lost all meaning. I have no idea what it really means to have that many viewers of anything. What was more interesting to me was all the engagement. I got to interact with other people, see their interpretation of the video, see how other people explain the content, and so on. TikTok is a very social experience.
Now, 4 days later, the video is still getting engagement, although it has slowed down. It has reached almost 110,000 views so far (speaking of numbers that my brain can’t comprehend, what is that even). All in all, the whole “going viral” experience is a bit surreal.
Of course, in the aftermath of this video getting so much attention, my newer content is feeling a bit ignored. But I suppose everything will shake out eventually and things will calm down and go back to normal eventually.
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my experience on TikTok. It’s absolutely nothing like I was expecting when I started out. And if you had told me in September that by the end of November I would be not only creating tons of content on the platform but riding the wave of going viral, I would not have believed you in the slightest.
Endnote: Fair warning, my TikTok account (if you can’t tell) is almost not at all academic, so if you follow me for academic reasons, you might want to give this outlet a miss until my more academic content gets added (it’s in progress but academic things take time). However, if you are BTS Army, feel free to come on by and let’s be friends.
