Hello and welcome back to Kai’s World! This week I will be retelling my journey on TikTok from these past few weeks since I spoke to you last, and man what a ride it has been! Since my last post, I made a commitment to explore more features the app had to offer and engage with TikToks in a whole new way. At the end of my last post I expressed my strategy of collecting new songs, hashtags, effects, and favorited videos, and as you can see below I have saved quite a few of my favorite TikTok features with hopes to use them in my own content in the near future:
#heyyyyy #foryourpage
Now, in terms of my own TikTok account (which I’m sure this is what you loyal followers truly want to know about), I have continued on my quest for TikTok fame by producing yet another piece of “micro-content”; a term coined by the Web 2.0 evolution. As you can see on my account page here, not only have I exactly doubled my following and who I am following in the last few weeks, but I have updated and revamped my bio for all to see.
As you can see my first video from 2 weeks ago has doubled in its view-count, with 40 whopping views, and my new video from this week has a startling 57 views thus far! In hopes to further personalize my account and make myself seem more “relatable”, I added a bio that cleverly reads, “heyyyyy! heyyy…how y’all doin?”, which is intended to be a humorous nod to the very famous TikTok sound clip that has hit viral status on the platform. Additionally, I linked my account to my Instagram account, as seen by the Instagram icon above my bio, hoping that this too will further my chances of gaining followers from TikTokkers outside my immediate friends!
Now, about the TikTok that I made for this week. I began looking for inspiration for this video within my saved sounds tab on the app, ultimately landing on a popular tune entitled, “Lalala“. I then wanted to experiment with one of the app’s effects and I chose the “clone squad” effect where basically the person you film, or yourself, is cloned. Then, starring my good pal @whitneydavis, we used the combined tune and effect to make a comical video featuring the well-known dance, “the whip”. Normally, I would not post such a silly video to the internet, but as Shirky outlined, Web 2.0 makes it so internet users like myself can address the public as well as private audiences.
After using the app for a few weeks now, I have noticed that every micro-video that pops up on my “for you” page has very specific hashtags that make those videos appear on my feed. These popular hashtags include, #foryourpage or shortened to read #fyp, #viral, and the hashtag of whatever effect the creator used in their video. So, before posting my own TikTok to the platform, I added those exact hashtags and tagged my friend, all with hopes to attract more viewers, likes, and cross-promote her page in the process! This seemed to have a positive impact since I gained a total of 3 likes and 4 comments on this new video, a great improvement from my first piece of content.
Concerning my activity on TikTok and my notifications, as you can see here my notifications page has been a lot more active with followers and comments as well as likes on my videos. I have also been experimenting with different types of commenting on other creator’s posts on my feed, especially on users’ videos that I am not friends with or, “influencers”. As seen below, I commented on this TikTok that belongs to a food TikTok influencer by the name of @foodwithmichel who has 81k followers and a total of 1.3 Million likes on his page. My comment, “you should make one for sf!” was a hopeful inquiry that I pray he will respond to, but in the meantime I will wait.
On the other hand, I have also engaged in a lot of personal tagging of friends on posts that I think are funny or relatable, as seen in the latter photo. I plan to do a lot more of this just to keep an active presence on the app that is more personal, and to further perpetuate Keen’s notion of the “look at me” generation that creates the perfect storm of narcissism (sorry Keen :/).
Lastly, before I leave you, I would like to say that these past few weeks on TikTok have been extremely fun and might I add very time consuming, but I have enjoyed being sucked into the viral black hole that is this app. Looking ahead, I would like to focus my next efforts on a few things. One thing is I would like to create more content using different features of the app such as viral dance mashups, effects and sounds. I would also like to further delve into the “trending” and “discovery” pages of the app to locate more niche content outside of my “for you” page and engage with those influencers. And lastly, I want to try and comment funny things on popular posts with hopes of gaining comment likes and therefore more followers and views on my page.
Once again, thanks for tuning in and until next time…. happy TikTokking!
kai's world! 