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The Great TikTok Experiment: Am I wasting my time?
Adventures in Publishing, Marketing

The Great TikTok Experiment: Am I wasting my time?

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Collage of images from the TikTok profile of BethCGreenbergauthor

TikTok? Me ?

When I typed “The End” on the last page of the last book in my Cupid’s Fall series, I had no idea I would soon be setting up my own TikTok account and learning the ropes. Spoiler Alert: One year later, in March of 2021, I posted my very first TikTok. And so began The Great TikTok Experiment.

Hypothesis: I’ll give it a go, post a dozen or so videos, probably make a complete fool of myself, and be happy if I get 100 views before letting my account wither on the vine.

In my mind, TikTok was a playground for the younger generation, home to silly videos that occasionally went “viral” for no discernable reason. (And honestly, it kind of still is.) Plus – and this is no small thing – creating visual content is HARD! I like words.

But TikTok had entered my radar for effective book marketing. It was time to take my head out of the sand and test the waters.

Note: This post will be much more fun for you (like 99/100 fun factor) if you are able to interact with the videos on my page. You’ll need to have the app installed – it’s free – on either your phone or computer. Don’t blame me if you get addicted!

Ah, social media.

The free features (everything users can access without buying ads) have much in common with my beloved vampires of True Blood and Twilight. Everything about them is specifically designed to draw you in with the sole purpose of sucking your blood. Here, let Edward Cullen tell you.

There’s a cynical but accurate marketing adage: If you can’t tell what the product is, YOU are the product. You know this already, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/TikTok user: YOU are the product. The audience being sold.

That’s fine as long as it’s understood. I get my free money’s worth every day, not complaining. But the hand that giveth a “free audience” (showing your posts to your friends and followers) is quick to taketh away.

“Organic” (non-paid) reach just doesn’t work at all. Our newsfeeds are a fraction of the content our friends are putting out. Why? $$$$$$$$

Pros and Cons of other platforms

While Facebook is for sharing baby pictures, Twitter is for political ranting, and Instagram is for showing off how popular you are, TikTok has a certain silly simplicity—a forum where you can dance in your living room, lip-synch bad jokes, capture animal antics, and share other slivers of your personal life.

The Atlantic, July 30, 2020

Setting aside the obvious pros (social interaction, momentary relief from reality, global connection) and cons (misinformation, malevolent organizing, echo chamber manufacturing, data mining), here are some specific pros and cons from my personal experience attempting to market books on other popular platforms:

Facebook

  • Having dabbled socially on FB for about a dozen years, I was comfortable using most of the features. When I engaged the commercial side, I didn’t have a problem setting up my author page – though ads are quite a different story (for a different, sadder post).
  • You can easily edit a post at any point. You can define the audience on a granular level for any given post. Doesn’t mean they’ll show it to all of those people, but they won’t show it (directly) to someone you’ve excluded.
  • FB groups are a great way to interact with other folks with shared hobbies and interests. There are groups galore for writers, publishers, and readers. In fact, I’ll be doing a live event on book 4‘s release day (Feb 8) over at Renee’s Reading Club! You’ll need a FB account and permission to join the group ahead of time in order to view.
  • “Organic reach” is a joke on FB. Our newsfeeds are a tiny fraction of what users curate for ourselves. Frustrating as both a user and a content creator.

Instagram

  • I’m a lousy photographer, so photos are not my best means of expressing myself.
  • I have to laugh sometimes at the circularity of the platform. Mention me in your IG story, and I get a notification so I can repost to MY story and tag you, and on and on it goes.
  • Thanks to a terrific virtual tour organizer named Suzy, my Cupid stories have been beautifully reviewed by a couple dozen “bookstagrammers” and viewed by the thousands of book enthusiasts who follow them.
  • At my level of engagement, it’s very hard to see any connection between IG activity and sales. I consider IG a long-term brand awareness builder.
  • Loads of bots and scammers to watch out for.
  • Um… sugar daddies.

Twitter

  • The word-centric platform appeals to the writer in me.
  • It’s a nice place to drop a quick thought that’s too short to be a Facebook post.
  • Posting is simple mechanically, but whenever I tweet, I feel like I’ve just mute-screamed into a deaf universe. (Sorry to go so dark there)
  • Hashtags such as #writingcommunity are huge echo chambers of writers following other writers. Supportive? Maybe. Effective? Nope.
  • Everyone is trying to out-clever each other. It’s exhausting.

So why bother with this TikTok experiment?

TikTok does several things astronomically better than its competitors:

  • Sheer numbers – Out of 4.48 billion active social media users, 22.32% use TikTok on a regular basis, according to backlinko.com. (Jan, 2022). That’s a mighty valuable asset to owner ByteDance, one the company is motivated to maintain and improve. If major content creators complain, TikTok (mostly) addresses the issue – at least for those accounts. (All TT accounts are not created equal. Mega accounts get special treatment in the form of features such as the ability to produce live content, to use hyperlinks in bios, to receive monetary gifts from viewers, etc.)
  • Audience Reach – While not all of Tiktok’s 1.9 billion monthly users are avid readers (which is clear from some of the content, but I digress), the hashtag #booktok has over 34.7 BILLION videos. A great (or even decent) review by the right TikTok book influencer can skyrocket a book to the top of the charts. Take a look at all the bookstore tables (and virtual tables) labeled “As Seen on BookTok” if you don’t believe me.
  • The magical “For You” page – When you open your TikTok app, you are shown a string of videos based on a number of factors: who you follow, how much time you spend and how you interact with certain videos (like, comment, or share), and what kind of content you post. The mysterious algorithm feeds you the content it believes will keep you on the app longest. Why? You guessed it – advertising dollars. My videos are shown first to my followers. If they gain any traction, they are then “pushed out” to for-you pages, where they can be seen by all those billions of potential viewers whom I would never, ever reach otherwise. And this is TikTok’s secretest sauce.

Here’s the fun part!

Time to check in on this TikTok experiment.

Methods: Learn basic mechanics of the platform. Post videos with frequency ideally ranging from 1-3 per day. Evaluate results, study advice, learn new techniques, try again and again and again.

If you were brave enough to view my page, you can see the 100+ videos I’ve posted and a few quick stats. If you “Follow” me (silly you), you’ll become one of those beta testers TT will use to see if my content is worth pushing out. Please, use your power generously.

Observations:

  • Ten months into this project, I have 1350 followers (a mere drop in the bucket on TT). Up till last week (more on this in a sec), my highest view count on a single video was around 1400. I’m not buying an “I’m TikTok famous” t-shirt quite yet.
  • Most of my videos get around 500 views. I don’t mind spending 30 minutes producing a text-rich video with excerpts from my books if 500 people are willing to take 30 seconds to look at it. That’s a fine return. A handful have racked up over 1000 views, which is by no means viral, but tells me they’re getting enough attention to tickle TT’s algorithm.
  • As you scroll through, you’ll also see a bunch of videos that never got out of the gates. Those happen to everyone, I’m told, just the way it goes.
  • There is no rhyme or reason that would explain why any one video on my page gets more views than another. Take, for example, this video I made using a text-to-speech robotic voice asking authors to show what book everyone should be reading right now:
 @bethcgreenbergauthor 1st in series on sale now ?#romcombookrecs #romancebooktok #greekmythologyseries #cupidlovestory ♬ original sound - Jessicca Augenstein

This did nicely, largely because a bunch of other authors hopped in to tout their own books. [Incidentally, they probably would have been more successful using my video to create their own as a “duet” (recorded a side-by-side with mine) or as a “stitch” (recording after a snippet of mine).] Happily, one or two viewers commented they were going straight to my buy links!

So I followed the sage TT wisdom that says mimic a successful video to create another. Here is the sad result of that experiment: 17 views. Same soundtrack, similar hashtags, similar content. Was it the gray nail polish in the first video? Excuse me while I go get a manicure!

The most outrageous happening so far

One late night of scrolling, I came upon a viral video (over 5 MILLION views!) with an absolutely ridiculous premise. Here, see for yourself.

Out of sheer exasperation, I “stitched” this video, adding my own content at the end. By the way, Tiktok encourages this sharing and collaborating. Creators are welcome to turn off the function, but most leave it on because it brings more people to their original content. Not that Paul needs any help from me!

Here’s my result, and embarrassingly, my most successful video so far at over 2k views and still accumulating views:

@bethcgreenbergauthor #stitch with @paulkri If you can’t beat ’em… #thealgorithmsentme #whatsmyniche #viralchallenge ♬ original sound – Beth C Greenberg

So THAT happened, and I, being a follower of good advice, went ahead and tweaked that post for my niche (TikTok is all about niches). You can view this spectacularly silly video here.

I taped my whole 4-book series to the wall, which sounds a lot easier than it was. I got them all to stay put long enough to capture it on video. Then, I let my book babies drop to the (blanketed) floor. It took an hour of my weekend, but so what? This one was going to take off!

Welp. This one that I “made relevant to my niche,” original content, kind of entertaining, right? 54 stinkin’ views. I still don’t get it.

Here are a few I’m actually proud of

If you have the time and inclination for a “highlights reel,” check these out:

So, what’s the verdict?

Analysis: I’d like to say I’m pre-successful.

Some negatives:

I can’t say my feelings about the platform have changed radically from my first impressions. I still feel old. It’s irritating that TikTok incentivizes creators to use the same 20 “viral” music tracks, and that music sounds like cars crashing in my head. It’s impossible to know (and honestly, frustrating as heck) what makes one video go viral while another gets twenty views – and I’m not saying all of mine should have gone viral. But that one with the books taped to the wall? COME ON, PEOPLE!

TikTok can be a huge time sink. While it is true that some of the most successful videos take only 10-15 minutes to produce, some take lots longer and require multiple media and lots of editing. Ideally, the “content” I’m creating with most of my time should be, um, BOOKS.

There’s a very real pressure to POST | THINK OF YOUR NEXT POST | POST | SCROLL TO SEE WHAT’S TRENDING | POST. Sometimes, it’s really stupidly too much stress.

Some big positives:

  • TikTok CAN be a lot of fun. People are goofy and sweet and genuinely want to entertain. (Not to be naive here, I get that mega creators do get paid and there are many, many perks to having a sizable following.) But there’s a dancing carpenter, a hunky guy who’s started reading romance books on TT, and lots and lots of good-looking guys who can’t wait to take off their shirts. Yes, please.
  • Authenticity is rewarded. You don’t have to get duded up or have pro equipment to make it work.
  • The mysterious, frustrating algorithm actually does a great job of delivering content to me that I want to see. Unlike Tivo, I can teach my algo really quickly what I do not want to see, and I’m rarely served that topic or creator again.
  • I have connected with book lovers directly (by commenting on their posts or sending the rare direct message) and turned a bunch of people on to my series.
  • So far, I haven’t spent a dime. I suspect that will change soon. TikTok is now doing a very good job of pushing out their paid videos over the creative ones, so that makes it harder for freeloading app users like me.
  • I LOVE learning, and TikTok constantly offers new challenges. I still marvel at how my daughter can grasp her camera in one hand and edit video and splice music and position text on the screen with just one thumb, but now I can do all these things too! Sure, I do it slower and with more fingers, and usually with a regret or two after I post, but I’m DOING IT!
  • TikTok coaches are the bomb! This wonderful woman who calls herself themuthership creates step-by-step tutorials for all the fun trends. She’s the one who taught me how to do the Superman freeze frame. When I tagged her on my post to thank her, she kindly replied with words of encouragement.
  • Creative collaboration turns me on. TikTok is a very cool way to collaborate with content creators from everywhere doing everything! Though much of the collaboration is silly, I’m all for human-to-human connection!

Conclusion: Am I wasting my time with this TikTok experiment? Oh heck yes, if I use book sales in the immediate term as my only metric. But as with every other aspect of writing and publishing, I’ve discovered so much more than what I thought I was looking for.

So how about you? Dare to join me on this new, crazy adventure? Check out my most recent TikTok right here and leave me a comment!

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