My Strategy Behind 2.7M Organic Views on a Single TikTok Video and Building Consistent and Authentic Engagement

Ratepunk has been building its TikTok presence for around five months. We finally hit that gold vein and went viral, reaching almost 3M views on a single TikTok.

With three separate accounts, each grown to over one thousand organic followers each and 300K likes combined, here are the things the team discovered on this journey.

Discovering your content direction

When starting on TikTok, you need to find the direction that works for you time and engagement-wise and stick to it.
For this reason, I don't want to do too many tests with different kinds of videos because when audiences find a relatable video, they follow. If you change the content too much, it annoys them, and they unfollow you since they expect the same content that initially drew them in.
Promote occasionally but not to the point where your users become annoyed and just see your "ads" in their feed.

For example

• On the Ratepunk_US account, there's organic growth solely because of relatable work/office-related memes (this is the permanent content direction for this account), but occasionally, I insert something about Ratepunk or startups in general. This, so far, is the most successful account.
• Ratepunk_UK is "startup creator" content, where we talk about Ratepunk and various other startup-related stuff from a startup creator's perspective.
• Ratepunk_EU is going to have travel meme-related content.

While building your audience, don't upload content that's solely about your company unless you do something unique and interesting to look at, for example - a bungee jumping service.

Ratepunk is not a bungee jumping service; we sit at the office all day and scale our awesome startup, so that's not really an option for us. :)

Targeting different countries with your content

So, targeting a certain country on TikTok is not as simple as using the right hashtags or speaking the right language.
Here's a checklist of what you need to get to target a specific country's demographic with your organic content (with ads, you can choose a certain country to target).

1. Preferably a different mobile device for every account (just have something powerful enough to upload a TikTok; you can edit your videos on whatever you feel best with).

2. This is the most crucial step: a different SIM card with a phone number from the particular country you want to target.
   For example:

• For the US account, we use a Sprint SIM card that we bought from the US
• For the UK account we use Vodafone card that we bought from the UK.
• For the EU account we just use our local provider, Tele2 here in Lithuania.

3. VPN. While some claim that it doesn't do anything to help you target the right audience, it's better to be safe than sorry, so we use a VPN 100% when we're accessing our TikTok account.

Weekly research

Every week, research new trending sounds because if you stick too much to the same thing, the trend disappears, and you're left behind, even if you've just discovered a sound that seems new to you.

The research method that works for me

Find the best trends for you by scrolling your TikTok feed and look for the same sounds/types of video that pop into your feed about ten times/half an hour.

You could try looking for TikTokers who speak about trends and try to tell you what is trending or not, but everything I've tried from these types of TikTokers doesn't even work compared to the results you get by doing your own research.

Your own feed is the best source of ideas what people who like similar content to yours might like

Grow your followers

I've tried several trends aimed at increasing follower growth. To get engagement, you have to grow followers, and you can't always bet on your content to produce those followers, so you should use various kinds of strategies. Everyone grows new accounts like this.

Fake it till you make it.

I tried the follow-train trend - you follow someone, and they follow you back. But over time, it was not time efficient, so I started massively commenting that I would follow people if they followed me, but I never actually followed anyone ( :P ) to save time. My strategy is to like all the comments in a row and comment on active posts that were created no later than a day ago and have good reach.

Other tricks, like reaching out to people via DMs or sharing my videos with random people, didn't work.

Be a part of the community to increase your engagement and chances of getting followed when commenting.

Understanding TikTok language, slang, and abbreviations, replying to other videos, and responding to comments under your videos is critical.

It's easy to become cringeworthy on TikTok, but with a few good replies, you can seem legitimate and trustworthy...or mess up very quickly.

I've noticed that in almost every comment section, there's some fight, and a lot of people (especially those not immersed daily in TikTok) don't understand the context, respond randomly, and it's very easy to cancel such users or show others that they're fake, a scam, etc.

In other words, your credibility heavily depends on your communication and insight into the TikTok environment. Simply put, the less clueless you appear, the higher the chances you'll get a follow.

Closing thoughts

Generally, it's important to follow everything happening on TikTok. To me, this medium is increasingly resembling one big maze and the more intuition and insight you have, the easier it is to navigate. For me, many followers came from those clickbait videos with long texts. Because on TikTok right now, those are a thing; they catch attention very quickly. If you're too lazy to read, you click save, follow, and scroll further.

But of course, if the trend changes, the videos will change, too.