30 Days of Video Creation

Or how TikTok killed my desire to date

I’ve been on TikTok for a while now, under my bookish account @katiemorwennabooks. However, in terms of creating content, text feels much more comfortable for me to talk about marketing and I have focused my attention on creating content for my newsletter (now here on Substack) and The Empowered Author Facebook page.

HOWEVER, I really wanted to experiment with this platform, and do something that was completely unrelated to the kind of content I share elsewhere. As I was really enjoying the dating content I consume on TikTok and always had such fun conversations about dating with my friends, I decided to start a (mostly) secret dating account.

Little did I know what I was getting myself into! But I have learned loads about TikTok, and hope you find it useful for your own experiments there.

5 things I learned from 30 days on TikTok

1/ Visibility is much easier there than Instagram

After 30 days, I have a sum total of 279 followers. That might not seem like a huge number, but that would fill up every nook and cranny of my house with people, so it’s a lot for one month of sharing content.

Most of my videos were seen between 400-1000 times, which is not ‘viral’, but it is still a LOT more than my average reels were getting seen (even though my follower numbers on Instagram are over 7x higher than TikTok).

I’ve also had multiple videos get seen more than 3k times, including one viewed over 17k times, and another over 36k times. Those are very big numbers, and they keep going up, even though it’s been weeks since I posted them.

2/ Things that worked best across the month

• Posting regularly. There are many TikTok experts out there saying that posting 3-4 times a day gets you the best results, and that was definitely my experience. The days where I posted more than once, I would get more views and more followers.

• Other people’s content is great for views, but make sure you’re adding value. The video with over 17k views was a clip where I took someone else’s video, and then added my two cents (literally, my bit of the video is about 2 seconds long) to the end. TikTok makes it very easy to jump on a piece of successful content and share your views on it. This video took me seconds to create, and it was great to see it going ‘viral’, but it added zero new followers. I put that down to the fact that what I added was funny-ish, but it didn’t really add a huge amount to the initial video.

• Post different types of content. I came up with a few different topics that fell under the same overall umbrella of ‘single mother in her forties dating’ (topics like self-care, solo activities, clothing, etc. This kept it fun for me and made it easier for me to create content, as I didn’t feel like I was talking about the same thing again and again.

• Hashtags. TikTok is amazing in that it seems to want to help you to get seen more. They even have this super helpful, free website where you can find out what hashtags are doing best in the areas you are sharing content in. You can also see which music and sounds are trending, and use those in your videos.

• Opinionated content. The video with over 36k views did well because it was a piece about why I deleted Bumble. I had a lot of *outraged* men in my comments, which helped to increase the views. Then I got a lot of supportive comments to counter those negative comments, and I gained around 100 followers in the 2-3 days after it went up, so I definitely consider this a ‘successful’ video BUT…

3/ What didn’t work FOR ME

• I don’t really love courting controversy, especially with strangers on the internet. Individually, the negative/ weird comments didn’t bother me, but I found them quite depressing and I wasn’t delighted to have to read through and block them. More opinionated content gets the algorithm going, which is why so many people do it, but it’s also not really my thing. I try to avoid conflict, not start it!

• I opened my DMs to people I don’t follow for a little while, because someone specific wanted to send me a message and I didn’t particularly want to follow them back. I wish I hadn’t! I have since closed my DMs, and will not be going back.

• I can keep up a daily posting schedule, but I also work full time and have two children - posting 3-4 times a day was not sustainable for me. I think I managed it on 3 or 4 days across the month.

4/ It’s helpful to have a big brainstorm of ideas before you start

Firstly, because TikTok is hungry and would really like you to share content there 3-4 times A DAY, and secondly, because at some point you are going to think to yourself ‘do I REALLY want to post a video today?’ and you might not want to, but if you’re me, and you make commitments to yourself that you absolutely WILL uphold, regardless of those stray thoughts, then you are going to want a bank of ideas to pull from.

As I said before, having a few different things that I felt fell under the umbrella of the topic I was talking about was really helpful for me.

If you start a TikTok account for your book / yourself as an author, really think about what different topics you can talk about that are related to your book or you as an author, but aren’t about your book or about your writing. Or think of something you can easily share every day without any effort. A few ideas you could share could be:

• Daily writing summary, just telling people how much you wrote and anywhere you got stuck / got into flow.

• Sharing a line or two from your WIP or book you’re promoting.

• Take a series of photos and share photo carousels instead of videos - these worked really well for me, and are much less effort than video.

• Take 8-10 short videos of what you’re doing throughout the day and then stitch them together at the end of the day into a 10 second video, with some kind of trending audio on top.

This leads me into…

5/ The content you share on TikTok (or anywhere) does not need to be perfect

What do I mean by that? I mean, you do not need to write a script and do a face to camera piece about Something Serious. Not a single one of my videos has my face in it.

You can just share a thought, a few words, a few photographs, snippets of your day, lines from your book. The one big plus of committing to posting every day is that it means you stop thinking about it being aesthetic and perfect, and just think about getting something up and posted. It can still connect with people and be meaningful to people.

When I first started, I wanted to make videos that had lots of little clips of my day, and I tried to slow down my voice so that it sounded less hurried, because I can talk quite fast and… I could not sustain either! In the end, every time I left my house, I would record 30 seconds of me walking (as in, the videos are of my shoes on pavement) or use old video footage of trees in the breeze or anything, really!

Then I’d add some text on top or an audio of me talking, and that would be that.

Some other tips / ideas:

• Use it as a user first so that you can see what kind of content you like and dislike, what feels fun or boring to you, and get some inspiration.

• Think about how you are going to process negativity / unconstructive comments.

• Add a cover frame so that it’s clear which video is about what on your profile.

• Think about what someone would be searching for to come across your video, and use relevant search terms in the cover frame, description and hashtags.

• The first 3-4 seconds of your videos are crucial! Do not waste them with a milennial pause or ‘ummmmm’ - cut your video so that it starts immediately as you are speaking.

• Always add captions. Even on TikTok some people will be scrolling with their sound off. And some people (like me), watch the videos at 2x speed, so the captions are useful to make sure what I think I hear is actually what the person is saying!

• I’ve heard that TikTok is prioritising longer videos (you can now share videos up to 10 minutes), so that could be something to experiment with going forward.

• The people who I follow, whose content I enjoy most, are great storytellers. I feel really invested in their lives in the way I might with a reality TV series. The people who have been most engaged with my content seem to view me in the same way. Think about how you can tell stories about your life and your writing, and get people invested in you and your success.

What’s next for me on TikTok?

After 30 days I kind of ran out of steam.

One side effect of doing this experiment is that it killed off my desire to date. There were so many comments and DMs from angry and entitled men who had projected some kind of fantasy on to me. It was very creepy and it made me go off the whole idea of trying to meet someone. I also got ghosted by someone - again! - during the 30 days, which didn’t help. So that definitely gives me less to talk about, ha!

I haven’t deleted my account, but I also haven’t posted anything since the 30 days ended. I might change the name and the focus to be more about enjoying being single, because I do very much.

Comments aside, I did actually have a lot of fun creating the videos, and it’s still something I would like to do more with. BUT I know that, for myself, I won’t do these off-the-cuff. I need some kind of challenge, even if self-inflicted, to motivate me.

The increase in visibility, and reaching totally beyond my existing audience, is a huge draw for me with my work hat on. Next time I have a new offer or product to promote, I will definitely make it part of my marketing plan, and also have some plans in discussion around creating some joint content with someone else in the new year. If you’re on TikTok and aren’t already following me, you can find me here.

Are you on TikTok? What kind of content have you noticed works best for you and what do you enjoy creating most? These are some things I picked up in my month of using it consistently, but if you’ve been there for a while, you likely have WAY more knowledge than I do. If you have any tips for fellow authors (and small business friends!), please do share them here.

PS: Want more marketing lessons, both from the experiments I do personally and from the publisher / author campaigns I’ve worked on? Consider upgrading to a paid subscription.