TikTok Growth for Individuals and Businesses in the AI Era by Mathilde Høj

Lecture Slides

About the Speaker

Lecture Transcript

Speaker Introduction

[00:00:00] 

last presentation is about TikTok growth for businesses and individuals in the AI era. And it’s by Mathilde Hoy Matilde. I’m very happy that you’re here. She had a delay in her flight because Copenhagen is snowed in, or at least as was trying to get fully snowed in. But she’s here. She made it round of applause for her.

Mathilde is an industry leading expert with social search and TikTok, SEO expertise with numerous appearances at a different conferences, webinars, podcasts, live streams, everything. She has done it. She has previously spoken at Brighton, SEO, which is where I watched her presentation first and I was blown away.

No pressure. You have to do even better today. She has search and stuff, Antalia performance conference in Oslo, SEO in Denmark, and so on and so on. [00:01:00] And fun fact about her, she is my personal hero because she has 53 tattoos and she is proud to say that she likes almost all of them.

Lecture by Mathilde Høj

Yes, thank you. I have a very ugly shark here. That’s the only one I don’t like. So TikTok growth, first of all, before we dive into TikTok as a platform, I just want to set the scene a bit because if we go back some years, the way we used to search was very basic. It was on desktop, it was text based, and it was in the traditional engines where when we look at it today, it’s an ever evolving ecosystem with a lot of different platforms and a lot of different channels that we have to take into account.

The two forces that we have that are driving this new research behavior we are seeing are primarily gen AI and machine learning changing the way the traditional [00:02:00] engines are working. So having AI overviews coming into play and AI mode as well. And then we have search behavior taking place in new environments and new platforms.

So for on TikTok, for instance, Reddit and platforms like that, when users are choosing which platform to search on, they are choosing based on which platform they trust the most. And they’re also very attracted to platforms that offers personalization. And that’s why we can say that personalization increases the feeling of trust.

Users are expecting this very bespoke and personalized feed. And did this is what Google was not previously delivering sufficiently before getting AI overviews in AI mode. And that is why we are seeing the shift in the behavior. Search has changed. So has the funnel. Usually when we talk about search, we have very low funnel [00:03:00] traffic.

It comes into the website and it converts, but now we can actually put the different types of searching into the funnel as well. So when we talk about awareness, we have social search. People go onto the social platforms, they search for different stuff or just take in the feeds that they’re getting, either during it passively or actively.

When we then have decided we want to buy a new laptop, we go onto the conversational engines and have a conversation around the specifications, the prices, the retailers. We really want to have that friend that can tell us what to choose. And then when we are ready for it, we go into either the brand website or retailer websites and actually convert or find a local store we can visit.

So when talking social search and those platforms in general, we need to keep in mind that the content we’re serving is bite sized. It has to be thump stopping, and it has to be [00:04:00] shareable as well because social search is many different things. But today it is TikTok. So TikTok is the main driver of search as, or social as search, because since it came into the market, you could say in 2019, it has really been doing lots of different things to make themselves more search engine like.

But to succeed as a creator in this environment, you must know the algorithm and you must know that it works as a recommendation system. So depending on the interactions you’re getting on videos, the liking, the comments, the saving and the sharing, the information you’re putting into the videos, the captions, the descriptions, the unscreen text and the voiceovers is all gonna impact what the algorithm shows.

This also goes for the device and account settings. So the language you’re speaking, the country you’re based in also plays into to what it shows. So when I [00:05:00] landed in Bulgaria yesterday, my for You page completely shifted. I’m now seeing still English content, luckily but from Bulgarian creators instead because that is more relevant for where am I right now.

Then lastly, the most important metric is the view time. You need to make sure that you are hooking your audience within the first two seconds, because if you’re not doing that, then you have lost them forever and it’s all about the points. So depending on the interaction you’re getting, the feed is gonna give it points.

And what it’s gonna do when you first post your content is show it to around 300 users. Then depending on the traction you’re getting, it’s gonna push it out to a thousand users and then it’s just gonna keep on going. And then you maybe have a rival radio video in the end. But that is not something we are optimizing for because that is just a unicorn really.

So if you’re not convinced yet, why [00:06:00] should you use your time on TikTok In Denmark, we actually did a survey in January where we looked into, I think a thousand user search behaviors between the ages of 15 and I think 70 or something. So very broad, not just Gen Z. And what we could see was that it was only 50% that would choose Google for all of their search needs.

So regardless of them searching for hair or finance or health or anything, really, it was only 50. And I would imagine if it go a couple of years back, that number would’ve been like 98% 15% would’ve chosen a chatbot, and 11% would choose TikTok for all of their queries. And Denmark is quite a small country.

So imagine how this looks in the UK or in the us, which are more mature markets. That’s crazy, really. So how do you get started? When you create [00:07:00] TikTok and go onto the platform? The first thing you need to do is just do some social listening. You need to know what is working for other people so you can tap into that as well.

It is not like any other social media platform, and that is extremely important to keep in mind. Then you can utilize the hashtags and the search function. So deep diving into what works and which topics are very popular, that is very handy to dive into that at first. And then you need to think outside of the box.

Choose an approach that works for you and create that hook in your videos. Do something controversial, something emotional, or something shocking. You don’t have to burn down a building, but you need to do something that might not be as polished as you tend to be on other platforms, especially Instagram.

So now you’re ready to create. The first thing you need to do is to find your primary keywords. Tap into some related keywords as well, and get creative. Create [00:08:00] videos for all of it. Not that they have to align on your profile. If you want to create a video around cars and also want to create a video around corporate talk, you can most certainly do that because the car video is gonna find its way down to the car talk.

And the corporate video is also gonna find its way down to the corporate talk. It doesn’t matter. It just has to be optimized. To get into that rabbit hole, you need to track your videos. TikTok doesn’t offer a lot of information around this, so find a way that works for you and find the metrics that are the most important for you.

Is it the views? Is it the likes? Is it the shares? Weigh them and find a tool that fits how you want to track it. Really make sure you’re answering questions in a fast and visual appealing way. Not that it has to look polished, it just don’t ha has to be a granular video that you don’t like looking at, really.

And remember that ordinary people are more trustworthy than a brand [00:09:00] trying to sell something. And this is extremely important. You are not selling anything on TikTok. You’re just sharing your knowledge. And what about ai? I have one question for this on TikTok. Have you seen any animals doing weird stuff lately?

This is the extent of how we see AI in TikTok today. I would say, because when I scroll through my for you page, which is a few days old than this video. But there isn’t a lot of AI content in my for you page. If there were it is the type of animal videos that you saw before.

But that is not something you can really try to a brand. I would say, because it’s not reflecting the sender, it’s just the, it’s just fun content really. So real content is still king, but AI can aid you in different things. Editing, for instance. So your captions, your sound choices, your auto cutting, your [00:10:00] just enhancements if you want filters and stuff like that is where AI comes into place.

Cap Cut is the preferred video editing tool for TikTok. It is owned by TikTok, so that’s why, and they have some AI capabilities, like this example I have here where it has gone into my camera roll role, chosen three random pictures and then given me 10 different examples on adding sound and cuttings and stuff like that.

And in this case, it works extremely well because it’s three images from the same vacation. So one of my boyfriend, one of some delicious Italian food and a pool. And it has chosen this theme of oh, I love these things very, oh. But if you’re also like me, who loves to take a lot of photos of really random stuff like screenshots and receipts and stuff like that, it’s not that spot on.

So it can give you some really weird videos with some really real sound choices. So in some cases, it [00:11:00] might just be easier to choose the videos or the images yourself, and then use it for editing. So yeah, keep it native, keep it down to earth. And making a good TikTok is all about being straight to the point, giving value, being relatable, keeping it short and fast paced.

Utilize hashtags and SEO, use the in-app features or cap cut, and forget about keeping it polished. You need to be true to your brand, both professionally or personally, however you choose to use the platform. And do not try to sell anything. And if you don’t always start, copy others. The examples I have with me today that I am afraid I won’t be able to show.

Yeah. The first one is du lingo. I think you all know it. They are very, they very much like to use the mascot to do different things and tap into things that are trend trending in general in the world. So in this case, it’s the new [00:12:00] Emily in Paris season where it’s on its way to teach the girlies French.

The next one is r now, and in this case it’s the thing where the gates are always really far away from everything else in the airport. I can talk from experience yesterday. So what Ryanair is making fun of here is that they have a personal trainer fee that is free of charge because you get your steps in.

So yeah, they know their products really well. And just tap into that. The next one here, and I’m so sorry, you can see it, you can see it a little bit here. Very nasty. It’s a local dentist in Denmark, in a small town, I don’t even know the name of. That’s how small it is. They, as you can see here, get around 42 million views on that type of video because it’s so oddly satisfying.

So every time they get a new client that needs this teeth print, they can just post that [00:13:00] again and get around the same average of views. So find something oddly satisfying people love Dr. Pimple Popper as well. The last one I have is actually from the Danish Police. They have this online department where they try to teach young children how to engage and act online.

And of course, one of the platforms where young users are is TikTok. So to engage with that community, they are utilizing TikTok. And in this case it was for the one year birthday on the platform where they did a TikTok dance, of course. And it’s very fun because when you think of the police, it’s a very polished institution that you wouldn’t think of going online and do TikTok dance.

So they’re extremely fun to follow and actually just got nominated for a social media award in Denmark as well. Yeah, they’re funny. So your key takeaways from this presentation should be that when you go onto [00:14:00] TikTok, you need to build a presence. You need to tap into what is already trending. You need to try different things and keep it down to earth.

You need to use AI to optimize your your processes and then repurpose the content to other platforms as well. You can most definitely take TikTok videos and flat them out to YouTube storage and Instagram reels. You can do it the other way around though. But that makes it easier to just optimize for multiple platforms at once.

That was all I had with me today. Thank you so much for listening.