Today in Digital Marketing - The TikTok Algorithm: Revealed!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, hello. Well, as I mentioned yesterday, this week, we are doing a full week of deep dive interviews with senior digital marketing practitioners and marketing scientists. And this is one you folks have been asking us to cover since forever. Deconstructing the TikTok content algorithm piece by piece. Today's episode covers three of the eight factors that determine if your brand's content will be seen by people. Premium subscribers, of course, getting the full 30-minute interview. More on that later. But for now, I'm joined by Lydia Infante. She is a senior SEO manager at Sanity.io. Lydia, welcome. Hi, thank you so much for having me. So before we get on the eight ranking factors that you've identified for TikTok SEO, there are two principles and three processes. Can we walk through those first before we get to the nitty gritty?

Starting point is 00:00:52 So the two principles that TikTok is following to decide what the ranking factors are going to be is to surface content that's going to be interesting to you and to burst filter bubbles. So they surface some unexpected stuff from time to time that's going to add some variation onto your feed. But in order to process and rank all of these videos for you, TikTok follows essentially three processes. TikTok is trying to understand what the videos are about and classify them on a topic. TikTok's trying to understand what videos are good quality videos. And TikTok's trying to understand you as a consumer, as a user. They're trying to understand what topics you're interested in. So TikTok needs to figure out these three things in order to serve you the best content. You published a very detailed blog post on Moz.com about this, where you list the eight ranking factors. How did you find out what these eight ranking factors were? How did you find out there were eight? Did you like hack into TikTok's documents or is this public data? some inference and a very educated guess um but essentially i was diving into tiktok public

Starting point is 00:02:08 documentation on their tiktok algorithm they have a bunch of good documentation laid out for that they also have documents for advertisers telling them like what is the best way to go about posting on tiktok um also for creators they documents too. They have developer documents where they outline like how to technically integrate, which is something that you can pull some information from as well. And something that really, really helped me understand fully how TikTok does some of this stuff is the legal documents on privacy. So TikTok is displaying different content, like different legal documents, whether you're in the US, in the UK, or in the EU.

Starting point is 00:02:51 So diving into those differences was pretty interesting too. Then I just amalgamated all of that together into eight ranking factors that are really easy to explain and actionable for marketers. All right, let's start with the first one. I don't think this will come as a surprise to people. It is engagement. But what type of engagement are we talking about? And how does that affect surfacing content on TikTok? So essentially, they're looking at views, how long you stay viewing it, if you like, if you comment, if you copy the link,

Starting point is 00:03:23 if you share it outside of TikTok, that's also counting positively towards the video. If you bookmark the video, it's also a very positive ranking signal. And then if you decide to go on to some of the TikTok features, such as the playlist, if you dive onto a playlist by the same author, you can be pretty engaged on those videos. And if you go and visit the profiles. There must be a waiting system, though, for this, right? I mean, it must be I've always thought that shares are worth an incredible amount, but maybe a like, you know, little heart icon isn't worth as much. But visiting the profile is worth more than sharing or something. Do you have a sense of what

Starting point is 00:04:03 those waitings might be? Yeah, I think it's safe to assume that this is going to be very similar to the Eddrug algorithm that used to rule Facebook. So a like would be the thing with the least value. A comment has a little more value. A share has a lot of value. And if you go into the creator profile because you've liked it so much and you go and follow the creator, that's going to have incredible value, right? Same as if you bookmark the video, if you share it externally, if you duet it or stitch it on TikTok, that's also pretty relevant. You mentioned Facebook in the early days. And indeed, one of the things that happened as soon as marketers figured out what the waiting was, was they would all post, you know, share this post with your friends and on your timeline. And so Facebook started to clamp

Starting point is 00:04:50 down and look for phrases where people were trying to artificially get people to share. We see that on TikTok a lot as well. People on content saying, you know, comment and share this post. Is there any evidence that TikTok is looking for or listening for, I guess more accurately, phrases that ask for inauthentic behavior, like sharing when someone wouldn't ordinarily share and knock that back a little? Absolutely. In fact, it's outlined on their community guidelines

Starting point is 00:05:18 and content that manipulates users into engaging with the video gets downgraded. It's part of their ineligible content, so content that wouldn't make it to your For You page. So definitely, TikTok has like tackled that head on. It took Facebook and Instagram way longer. Yeah. You know, one of the things that sort of I find amusing is that although TikTok, as you say, you know, is looking for those sorts of inauthentic behavior prompts, they have pages and pages of stickers that are like, share this, like this, you know, it's a little of both. This video engagement, is it measured at the video level or at the account

Starting point is 00:05:57 level? It is measured at the video level and the video level only. But the fact that your account can have followers somewhat indirectly affects ranking as well because it allows you to expose your video to a wider audience. And therefore, the video is good. It gets positive engagement faster. So it's a bit of a snowball effect. But when it comes to engagement,

Starting point is 00:06:21 it is measured only at video level. Also, according to TikTok's recommendation. And does follower count have anything to do with this? If a brand has a TikTok account that has 100 followers, are they going to be shown 10 times less than someone who has, I don't know, 1,000 followers? Not at a brand level, but they are going to be shown to a fragment of those 100 followers, right? So once they're shown to a fragment of those 100 followers, we can assume that TikTok does something similar to what LinkedIn does, shows your video to a bit of a testing audience, and based on that initial engagement, decides to roll it out to a wider audience or not. If you have a larger amount of followers,

Starting point is 00:07:06 you have a larger base of audience that this video is tested onto. And you can sometimes see when you get a video that is clearly in a test, you'll be on the For You feed or Followers feed or whatever, and you'll be sort of flipping through, and that's a great video, and that's a great video, and that one's great.

Starting point is 00:07:22 And then the fourth one will be just some random, terrible, boring video. And I just look at the likes count, and it's zero great video and that one's great. And then the fourth one will be just some random, terrible, boring video. And I just look at the likes count and it's zero likes, zero comments. And I feel, oh, I see. I've been put into, I'm in that test group for that post. I do exactly the same. It can also be, if the topic of this video

Starting point is 00:07:40 that you're being shown is not a topic that you're interested in, it can be following the principle of bursting filter bubbles. But if it's in a topic that you're interested in, even though like the video is not actually good, you're in the test group. All right. So that's the first ranking factor of TikTok SEO, and that's video engagement. Let's talk about the second one you identified, and that has to do with the Discover tab. Yeah, so that's like the enhanced capability of going wider and deeper into a TikTok creator. So you can go into the TikTok creator, you can click onto the search keyword that they give you

Starting point is 00:08:18 at the very bottom of the screen that looks like the playlist. If you're searching for a specific topic and further engaging with that topic in your Discover tab, you're very likely very interested in that topic. So you're going to be shown more videos in that topic. Right. But how does that help the brands, though? I understand how that helps the viewers sort of build up an algorithmic profile, but does that help any of the brands though i i understand how that helps the the viewers sort of build up an algorithmic profile but does that help any of the brands i guess if you manage to internally rank your videos for common tiktok searches then if though if there's engagement on those videos you're getting like the opportunity to receive that engagement. If your video is, if your thumbnail is appealing

Starting point is 00:09:05 and it has a higher CTR on the discover tab, TikTok can assume that your video is more appealing to your audience. Okay, excellent. And then the third ranking factor is the one that I think most people assume is there. And that is the actual content of the videos. Can we talk about each element though? There's visuals, there's the audio, there's text over video, there's all sorts of stuff in a very short TikTok video. Walk us through what those are for us. Yeah, absolutely. So in the privacy policy on TikTok, TikTok outlined that they can detect and collect the characteristics and like the body parts that appear on the video. So it's very safe to assume that you're using some type of visual AI to actually process the visual material of the video and understand what is included in your video. Then you've got the side of the audio. So when I'm talking about the audio here, I'm not

Starting point is 00:09:57 talking about the TikTok sounds. I know it's confusing, but it's different things. So that would be the actual text or words spoken in the video. As you know, users can write text over the video. It can be like to annotate it or to make it more amusing, to enhance it, or to do like some kind of manual captioning that also provides a strong signal. Then you've got the title and hashtags. In my mind as an SEO, I imagine as the on-page optimization of the video. So you've got the little caption at the bottom that you can type out with the choice of hashtags that you use. That used to be the strongest signal to TikTok of what is the topic of the video. And TikTok heavily relied on it. The hashtags are quite spammy now, so I can imagine that they have toned that down on

Starting point is 00:10:53 their algorithm a little bit, but it used to be the one that was most spoken about. And then lastly, you've got the TikTok sounds. And the TikTok sounds, if you're a TikTok user, you know that they have a meaning of their own, like the sound stands alone. So if you have the sound that goes, let me skip to the good part, you know, you're going to see a montage of like crappy pictures. And then at the end, a very happy person, or you can see the, any of the dances, any of the sounds that have become memes, they have a meaning of their own. So you using one sound or the other on the TikTok affects the meaning of your video.

Starting point is 00:11:35 So TikTok also processes that to understand it. Can we go back for a second to the hashtags? You know, I think about any time a platform comes on stream that uses hashtags, marketers obsess over hashtags. Like there is an actual industry with hundreds of SaaS products just for Instagram hashtags. There are Instagram hashtag tools built into third party platforms. How much do hashtags really have an effect on TikTok SEO? If we are to believe TikTok documentation, they have a big effect.

Starting point is 00:12:12 I could speak to my own experience, but it wouldn't be, I don't think that would be that relevant. My hashtags when I post in the very few occasions where I post are like music cover singer um but there's people that post about cars with the hashtag beauty something something or brand i think they're they're trying to get like amplification from it or maybe they're using some of those third-party tools that have gone a little bit rogue but in theory according to tiktok documentation, yeah, TikTok uses this. It's funny, too, because when I see the hashtags on TikTok, a whole bunch of people will try to jam for you page for you. FYP into the hashtags, like as if that's some sort of magic bullet that it's like, well, all you have to do is put that as a hashtag and you will be on the for you page. I don't think there's anyone in our business that believes that that's actually there.

Starting point is 00:13:07 Am I wrong at that? I'm pretty sure there's people in this business that think it is there because I've seen advice for social media managers saying, put For You and you're going to be more likely to get on the For You page. That seems false. Yeah, it sounds absurd to me.

Starting point is 00:13:23 But it could be, You know what's funny? It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy where all the marketers that are focusing on creating really good content use the for you hashtag. And then maybe some rogue algorithm within TikTok calculates that the for you hashtag usually is associated with good content. Right. I see. Yeah. Yeah, sort of through the back door, I guess. Do we know how many hashtags is the perfect number or a range? Because I, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:49 I've seen people post one or two or none. And then I've seen people just absolutely fill it up. And now that the character count on captions has gone enormous, I mean, it could be, you know, 50, 60, 70 hashtags. Do we know what the sweet spot is? I think I read on the documentation for advertisers that they're recommending three to four. Hmm. That's fewer than I think most people post. Yes. And we're going to leave it there for this version of the episode.

Starting point is 00:14:17 Our full conversation went on for another 15 minutes covering the remaining five factors. One of which, by the way, is the current battery state of the viewer's phone. I kid you not. You can read her full blog post on Moz.com. It's called TikTok SEO, Understanding the TikTok Algorithm. Or listen to the full episode without ads right now by signing up to our premium feed. Subscribe right on your phone. It only takes about 20 seconds to sign up. Tap the link in our show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash premium. Still ahead this week, everything Google ads, how to use humor to reply to angry social media complaints, and predictions on the year ahead in digital marketing from one of the industry's top tech journalists. That's all coming your way this week. Thanks for

Starting point is 00:15:02 listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The TikTok Algorithm: Revealed!

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