TikTok Growth Tactics Founders Ignore

0:00Everyone talks a lot about the TikTok algorithm and they talk about how great it is in terms of really personalizing content to you and of course like that is the reason why it's incredibly addictive it has over 2 billion downloads and just hundreds of millions of daily active users primarily because it is one of the most addictive platforms out there but behind this addiction is a really well-trained algorithm which basically serves you the right content every single time today's bite-sized episode comes from my conversation with timothy armaux tim founded fanbite to just 21 years old, scaled it into one of Europe's leading Gen Z marketing agencies, and exited in a multi-million pound deal to Brain Labs.

0:42The way that you grow on TikTok, and the way that we've been able to take people from like zero to 100 ,000 fans in two weeks very easily. The way that we've been able to do that is because we don't go, let us now just try and grow our audience on TikTok. We go, what is the niche that this brand or this influencer can pretty much dominate because if you dominate that niche TikTok then goes right this is good content this is good for this niche let me show it for more people. Welcome to this special bite sized episode of Screw It Just Do It from our back catalogue of over 550 past episodes. Today we're hoping to find out how to create an army of fans around your business or brand using TikTok how to grow your TikTok account to 100 ,000 within 14 days of using Fanbyte's three-step strategy, and how a single TikTok campaign led to over 200 ,000 fan videos within four days.

1:41First one is understanding the algorithm. Now, what I'm going to show you here is everyone talks a lot about the TikTok algorithm, and they talk about how great it is in terms of really personalizing content to you. And of course, that is the reason why it's incredibly addictive. It It has over 2 billion downloads and just hundreds of millions of daily active users, primarily because it is one of the most addictive platforms out there. But behind this addiction is a really well-trained algorithm, which basically serves you the right content every single time. But with every social media network, there's one fundamental thing that you need to understand about it.

2:22And this is none more true than on TikTok, which is this, right? every single social network supportive advertising pretty much has these three things. Their aim is to show you more of what you're interested in so you can spend more time on the app so they can serve you more apps. That is pretty much the business model there. Now, the reason I start off with this in order to understand the algorithm is because once you understand this, everything will start to make a lot more sense to you. So if you're trying to grow your account on TikTok then and you understand this then rather than saying how do I grow my account to you know millions of people every single time across the whole of TikTok well you start to think about it TikTok is actually structured into these so rather than thinking about it as like two billion users or something like that right the best way is to think about it as they're in their own distinct niches so you have you have the cat names frank family lgbt business dance videos cars dogs etc and the way that you grow on tiktok and the way that we've we've been able to take people from like zero to hundred thousand fans in two weeks very easily and the way that we've been able to do that is because we don't go let us now just try and go out in the tiktok we go what is the niche that people that this brand or this influencer can pretty much dominate because if you dominate that niche tiktok then goes right this is good content this is good for this niche let me show it to more people so just understand firstly this idea of the niche because there's a second bit to it as well as with the tiktok algorithm one of the big things is tiktok favors videos over profiles so here's an example right this girl here has 11 000 followers but on that post i've just highlighted she got 1.3 million views so we see this every single day like someone with like 2 000 fans or 3 000 followers will have like 4 million views on a piece of content.

4:41You're wondering, how is that possible? Because on Instagram, that is not really possible on such a regular basis. On Instagram, if you want 4 million views, you must have, you know, 10 million followers, right? So it scales like that. But on TikTok, you'd find that actually what they do here is they prioritize the videos over the profiles. So remember, the first thing here is your aim is to dominate a specific niche that your brand is and secondly your aim is then to actually create video content not too much care about your profile but create video content which services that particular niche which would then give you the highest likelihood of then going viral so I'll explain this here so this is fundamentally the way the algorithm works and the way TikTok chooses to essentially like the path to virality right so what happens firstly is they show content to your tribe so let's say I'm a I run a dog food brand or something right and I post something on TikTok what it will show me what it would do first is it would show my content to people who who have indicated that they are interested in like dog food and stuff like that and i'll show you how to signal that um right after this but it shows that content to them and then if they like it it then shows it to and it then shows it to people similar to that audience and then if they like it then they end up on the for you page so if you don't understand what the for you page is everyone in this chat right now could go on tiktok and they will see completely different things and that is because they end up on the for you page and the for you page is a personalized curated version of the content that tiktok wants you to see and that is where you actually want to end up as a brand because if you end up on the for you page then you are able to get millions of views on your content but the path to getting there is not just like i'm just going to create some stuff and hope for virality the path to getting there is actually firstly to this first way here is to get really good content targeted at the niche that you serve whether it is the content or use the hashtags and then if that's a good content tiktok will show it's more people and then more people and then it ends up on the for you page and that is the step-by-step way in which you can actually um uh like grow the videos on your profile and if you grow the videos that would then eventually grow your own profile as well so this is something that we talk about quite a bit so if you look at that section there i say the reason why most people absolutely fail at tiktok in order to get this whole cycle going is they don't do something called warming the algorithm and warming the algorithm is this term that that we basically came up with which is basically like telling tiktok the type of content that you would like to be placed in so for example here what we just basically everyone knows about maslow's hierarchy of needs i basically plagiarized it and just went with the hierarchy which seems to me that you have these are the three things you can do in order to essentially signal to the algorithm what you want to be able like what you want your content to be so again i'm going to take the dog food brand for example if i wanted to go from zero to hundred thousand and say the first like two weeks but the first maybe two three days i wouldn't post anything but all i do is i'll go on the hashtags that are linked with my niche so I might go on dogs on TikTok um canine love um dogs um TikTok dog like literally a whole list of all these things and then I will watch their videos and then I will leave comments on them and the reason why I do that is because then TikTok goes right this account is one that likes dogs let me group them all together similar to that thing that I showed you at the beginning where everything is a niche and stuff so that when i then post a piece of content maybe on my fourth day or my fifth day tiktok goes cool i'm going to show it to the dog lovers there and if i then show it and and if they like it which is i if it's a good piece of content where it's funny or uses a trend or something like that then they approve it tiktok shows it to more people and more people and then that's how you actually go viral and you pretty much can just use that exact same thing like every single video you go i want to dominate that niche that i have and every niche has a hashtag or something like that and i want to dominate that and then i um and i will use the hashtags and all that stuff linked to my video and in doing that i will then trigger the algorithm to then end up showing my video to more and more people The more that you do that, the more your video views go up, the more your profile followers go up.

10:09Does that make sense to everyone? Yeah, that's good. Like it really simply explained as well. So that was Timothy Armou. And every time I speak with him, I'm reminded why he's one of the sharpest entrepreneurial minds of his generation. A few things really stood out for me in this conversation. First, his ability to spot shifts before everybody else. Second, the way he talks about execution speed, not perfection, not endless planning, but momentum. And finally, I love Tim's honesty about building fanbites as a young founder. He never pretended to know everything, but he surrounded himself with people who could help him grow.

10:44He listened, he adapted, and he kept his ego in check. If you want to go deeper, the full interview is linked to the show notes. Absolutely worth your time. And if this clip gave you something to think about, hit the follow button, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and I'll see you on the next episode of Screw It, Just Do It.