How TikTok Is Reading Your Mind — Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

[Music] howdy Moss fans and welcome to a new edition of whiteboard Fridays have you ever felt like Tick Tock is reading your mind it's just an algorithm my name is Lydia Infante I'm the senior SEO manager at sanity and I'm going to talk to you about how Tick Tock offers you the videos that you like the very first thing they're trying to do is to show you videos that interest you they're trying to keep you in the app as long as possible so they need to figure out what you like how are they going to do it the moment that you sign up you provide some demographics data your age your gender where you're signing up from all gives Tick Tock enough information to start assuming what your interests are going to be and populate your for you page out of that first for you Paige the topics that you engage with or don't engage with are going to give Tick Tock the information about what you might enjoy seeing on your for you page after that they're going to try to find related topics to the ones that you have expressed an interest in for example I really like cross stitching it's not difficult to assume that I also like interior design or flower arrangements which I do Tick Tock shows them to me and I stay on the app much longer than I should another point of information is your followed profiles and the topics that they talk about or that they are interested about your discover tab behavior is a very strong signal for tick tock too what that means is when you search for a hashtag click on a hashtag make a tick tock search for user or a trend or a tick tock sound that's all giving strong information to tick tock about what you like because making a search or diving deeper into the content of a sound is much more complicated Behavior than simply just scrolling past on your for you page now that they know what you like they know that they can serve you videos about it but first they need to understand what the videos that they have in the database of content are about to do that they're going to use the visuals so literally tiktok can see with a visual AI the content of your video what are the objects are in there are their faces what are the emotions of their faces is there a dog is there a chair they're going to be able to see and process all of that another strong signal is going to be the text overlay that you put on your tiktok video if you have any notes or any content put on there or if you're manually inputting the captions the audio on your video is very relevant for tick tock to understand what the video is about and by Audio I don't mean Tick Tock sounds we're gonna come back to that I mean the actual voice the words that you're saying or the ambient noise that sets the location of your video the captions and hashtags that you use in the video are very relevant and help Tick Tock understand what it's about as well when you are done with creating your video and you start typing it out when you create the cover for your video using the tick tock tools that gives Tick Tock that level of information and then we've got the tick tock sound if you're using a tick tock sound that's related to a trend or to a topic it also gives the talk the information about what your content is what the emotional tone of your content is and so forth all of these elements as a hardcore SEO um are what we would treat us on page SEO but on the tick tock side of things now they know what you like they know what their database of videos are about but they also know that they have a limited amount of time for your attention so they're going to want to show you only the best of the best of their content they're going to have to understand if the videos they got are any good how are they going to do that they're going to be using amongst other metrics engagement so the engagement of users that have expressed similar interest to yours are going to help Tick Tock predict your potential engagement and how much you're going to like the video they're also going to be favoring native content creation so any video that's been created directly from tiktok using the tick tock tools is going to get a little bit of a boost the language that the content is in is very relevant to when signing up for tick tock and creating your profile you State what are the languages that you speak and what is your preferred language tiktok can also understand this based on your behavior then the device that you're using and the strength of your connection also helps Tick Tock serve you lighter videos and shorter videos when you're maybe on a train or don't have as good connection to actually have a good viewing session there's some stuff that tick tock does not want to see on their for you page any content created by a user that has stated that their date of birth is under 16 is not going to be eligible for the for your page so if you're trying to be queued and giving your brand account um date of birth when it was founded don't because nobody's going to see it they're also quite strict with QR codes they don't want to see any QR codes in there because of safety reasons you don't know if that QR code is going to take your users to a Spam website or a dangerous website showing porn or violent content but also they don't want to miss out on the affiliate marketing payout that they get when you shop directly on The Tick Tock shop any dangerous or violent behavior is also not accepted or eligible for the for you page so unless it's stacked as done by specialist don't try this at home so forth it's not going to show up engagement based content is also not eligible for the for you page so content that tries to track users into engaging with it without them actually naturally wanting to engage with it is going to be demoted from the page that type of content is um like when on Instagram we used to see posts that said tap twice to see some magic and the only magic is that you had like the pose and increase the engagement of the brand that is the type of Engagement made that's not acceptable on Tech talk another thing that they don't accept on their for you page is any content that shows tobacco products Tick Tock wants to show you videos that interest you and keep you in their platform but they're also trying to not generate an echo chamber for you ankle Chambers are a very real risk of any recommendation algorithm that's based on interest and engagement and we have seen a rise in radicalization across different populations because of this the way that Tick Tock is trying to address this problem is by offering random content of random interest random creators that you've never seen before on your for you page initially they said they were doing this about 10 of the time but there aren't any current numbers about this activity this is not enough to remove Echo Chambers because of the psychological effects of familiarity and rear exposure effect once you see something that does not quite fit right with your for you page you're very quick to scroll it is a similar phenomenon to better blindness when we are going around the website we kind of know what an ad looked like and we don't even look in that direction it's a similar effect so it is not enough but one must appreciate that they're trying if you found this interesting you can catch up with me and my content on Twitter at legionfantim on LinkedIn looking for Lydia Infante or on my website Lydia infante.com thank you for watching