What Makes A Successful TikTok Video?

Compared to other social platforms, TikTok boasts better brand recall than any other platform. That means when you post on TikTok, your content sticks in the minds of your viewers more than anywhere else. As an artist using TikTok to advertise, promote, and share with their fans, this is a major source of engagement to take advantage of. But what makes a video successful? In this post, we’ll break down some best practices to help you make the most of your efforts.

What Makes A Successful TikTok Video?

Here’s the rundown…

On TikTok’s Business blog, they talk about how users on the platform pay attention to and engage with TikTok content. In this post about understanding ads on TikTok they mention:

“TikTok’s For You page consistently drives engagement for both content and ads. Regardless of how long an ad stays on screen, TikTok draws early attention and physiological engagement in the first few seconds. In other words, ads on TikTok take less time to make an impact with their audience than similar ads on other platforms.”

One of the best things about TikTok is the freedom to create whatever you want, and with the knowledge that what you put out there is going to be received in a couple seconds makes it easy to narrow down what you want to say in a couple seconds and make it count. That brings us to the first point that makes a video really successful: timing.

Keep It Brief

The length of your TikToks should make sense for the message you’re trying to get across, but overall it’s been proven that shorter videos perform better. — 1 in 4 top-performing videos have a duration between 21 and 34 seconds and see, on average, a 1.6% lift in impressions.

Quality Matters

Bad quality video is the worst, and if it’s meant to represent you? Even worse. Make sure the quality of your content is in tip-top shape. The overwhelming majority of top-performing TikToks (83.2% to be specific) have a video resolution of 720p or higher.

Use a Vertical Format

Having to turn your phone to watch a video in the right format seems like a small ask, but trust me, it isn’t. If a user has to make the effort to adjust themselves to watch a video, they just aren’t going to watch it. Most videos on the platform are shot in vertical format, which means TikTok users don’t have to rotate their screen to watch the next video on their For You Page. According to TikTok, “Videos shot in vertical format see a 40.1% lift in impressions compared to videos using a square or horizontal aspect ratio.”

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Go Full Screen

More than 98% of the top-performing videos on TikTok utilize full-screen with their videos. Compared to the ill-fitting videos with the cropped sizing and empty space, videos which use the full 9:16 aspect ratio see a 60.5% lift in impressions.

That’s a big difference!

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🧠 Learn more about TikTok…

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Add Captions

TikToks that include closed captioning or text on screen that displays a call to action have a 55.7% lift in impressions compared to videos that don’t add anything additional on screen. It’s also super easy to do, so why not?  You can add captions right in the app.

• After you record your video and press the V to go to the next screen, there’s a button that reads Captions. All you have to do is choose that option, and the app uses speech recognition to auto transcribe what you said and put it on the screen.

In Conclusion…

These best practices have been proven through in-depth stats straight from TikTok. With them, you’ll see better engagement with your content in no time. In the meantime, be sure to check out our TikTok guide where we share inside knowledge for artists looking to optimize their efforts on the platform. // Check out the guide and download it for free right here.

You got this!