The Smartest Way to Grow on TikTok in 2025  ## Metadata - Author: [[Social Media Marketing Podcast]] - Full Title: The Smartest Way to Grow on TikTok in 2025 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/d015d83b-48ab-4dde-9fe7-619cb16d28af ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **From Law School To TikTok Breakthrough** - Mike Yanda started a coaching business during law school and leaned on referrals before TikTok. - After six weeks on TikTok he hit 10,000 followers and generated thousands in sales, proving rapid audience-building is possible. Transcript: Michael Stelzner So I started a coaching business back when I was in law school. Mike Yanda Over the course of my career, I feel like I've gone through these long phases of just feeling like I was too busy for content, whether I was in law school or when I was an oil and gas attorney. And then even eventually when I went full-time in business, I was a stay-at dad. And so I never felt like I had the time for it. And like a lot of people, I was just very reliant on referrals. I had a good business. It allowed me to leave my career and like have this better lifestyle and everything. But you're constantly chasing that. You don't know where your next leads and things are going to come from. And I actually had a few years back, I had this client, I've been working with him for years. And this guy was paying me about six figures a year. And he calls me up one day and he says, Mike, love you to death, man, but I'm making a career change. And so we're not going to be working together anymore. And when you lose that much income that quickly, you panic a little bit, right? And so I had to hustle my face off for a few months really to kind of rebuild revenue. And he wasn't my only client, but he was a big one. The whole time as I'm hustling and trying to get leads and trying to build everything back, I just kept thinking to myself, if I'd had a personal brand, if I had actually been creating Content and I had an audience to sell to, how much easier would this have been? And I started to think of content as like my life insurance for my business and I wanted it. And around that time, I had some clients that we'd been doing paid traffic for, and they wanted to build an organic presence. And I remember a lot of them having interest in TikTok, but they're like, I don't want to dance around and act like a fool. I want to get business from it. I want to get clients. And it turned into this bet. And I was like, oh, I think we can do it. I'm going to show you that you can grow on TikTok without doing the dances. A little less than six weeks later, I'd gone from knowing nothing about the platform to 10,000 followers was bringing in thousands in sales from TikTok. ([Time 0:03:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c7e7a515-47a3-4373-abc1-de41e0d58310)) - **Interest-Based Feeds Changed Social Media** - TikTok popularized interest-based feeds that serve content to users based on consumption, not social graph. - Skills that win on TikTok translate to YouTube and Instagram as platforms shift toward interest signals. Transcript: Mike Yanda I think there's kind of this trend right now of people saying that like social media is not social anymore. And that's because of TikTok. Even if you go on Instagram or you go on some other platform, it's not about your friends following you to get life updates. It's about people being served content around the things that they are interested in. And that interest-based algorithm that all came from TikTok. And so if you can understand how the TikTok algorithm works and you can win there where it's the most competitive and 98% of your views are coming from people that don't know you, then Those skills translate to YouTube. They translate to Instagram. They translate everywhere because even though some of those still have follower components to their algorithm, they have shifted to keep up and to keep audiences to be more interest- Based. ([Time 0:09:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb512c7d-2364-4e8d-8a2e-dcf423287a26)) - **Use 200-View Runs As Experimentation** - Treat 200-view episodes as a learning zone rather than punishment and keep experimenting. - Improve hooks, ideas, and packaging to move past the initial small test audience toward broader reach. Transcript: Mike Yanda Yeah. So the 200 view jail is not even like a real thing. Like people think it's, oh, TikTok hates me. They have me in jail. I can only get 200 views. But what it really is, is that Tik TOK is showing your video to a small sample audience to figure out if your video is good, because the way that they determine what goes viral and what doesn't Is they basically put your content head to head with other ones. And the ones that get the most views, the most watched time, most engagement, those kinds of things are the ones that are going to get pushed. So when you have 200 views, that just me, and you're not getting beyond that. It just means like your content's not good enough yet. It's a skill you have to learn. Maybe you're not, you know, making the best ideas that you possibly could, or maybe you're making great content, but you haven't packaged it in a way to get people to stop scrolling in The feed, or maybe you're making great content, but you're confusing the algorithm a little bit. So it's not showing your content to the right people. So there's some simple things that we can do that we're going to get into today to like make your content have a higher likelihood of success. But I would just, if you're in that 200 view place, don't get discouraged. It's part of it. And don't worry about if you feel like your content isn't good, because if you're stuck in 200 views, it usually means that those 200 people aren't watching it anyway. ([Time 0:12:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/00682fb3-cc5d-468b-af0c-ac54f2db1430)) - **Play Duration Is A Central Signal** - TikTok's creator docs reveal play duration (watch time + finish rate) is a key ranking signal. - Shorter videos with high finish rates or repeat watches outrank longer videos with lower completion. Transcript: Mike Yanda So I think the first thing is that if you're willing to read, TikTok does put out a lot of announcements and a lot of documentation about how their creator rewards program works and how These different features. And when they do that, they kind of tell you what they want, which is really useful. And so you have to be careful because there might be something like I always hear people talk about SEO on TikTok and put keywords on the screen and slide them off. But TikTok has actually come out and said anything that's not on the screen or in your description is not being used. So if you slide that off, it's not going to work. So there's a lot of misinformation out there, but then they'll give you things like when you talk about monetization and views, they talk a lot about play duration and they actually Under the creator rewards program define play duration as watch time plus finish rate. So one of the big things they're looking for is they want people to watch a large percentage of your video, but they want people finishing it. So it's not one of those things that you can game and just say, I'm going to make a four or five minute video because any people watch a whole minute of it. No, they would rather you make a 60 second video and a high percentage of people finish that video. Or maybe even watch it again, right? Then you get even better. Or even watch it again. Yeah. And so things like creating savable content is really, really helpful for increasing your play duration because sometimes we're just scrolling on our feed in the grocery store, but We see a video and go, oh, I love that. I want to do that. And you save it. And then maybe later that evening or a week later, you actually watch it and you watch it the whole way through. Maybe you go back and watch another part. Now you're getting big play duration, right? You're getting that watch time. You're getting that finish rate. ([Time 0:17:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2da90c12-21f4-434b-aa98-9d5565d4e487)) - **Reply Fast To Boost Watch Time** - Encourage engagement and reply to early comments to increase loops and watch time. - Ask questions in replies to coax repeat views and boost the video's performance metrics. Transcript: Mike Yanda The other big one is engagement. I can always tell when somebody is about to blow up when I'm talking to my clients because they start getting a lot of the same people repeatedly commenting on their content and so what That means is somebody discovered them because all your content goes to the for you page it's like consider every video is going to people that don't know you but then after that percentage Of them are going to follow and then they're going to watch your other content and so when those people start commenting that means they're watching every video you put out and you kind Of reach this critical mass where enough of them are watching a new piece of content that you hit the whatever the magic metric is for play duration and it takes off and so if you can create More engagement conversation and you can start to build those fans, it's going to be huge. And with the engagement, your video is playing when people are engaging. So if somebody is commenting to ask you a question or they're commenting to disagree with you, the video is looping. And so you're getting that watch time with the comments. So when somebody responds to your video and you're in the early days, respond back, ask them questions, get them to come back to the video because now they're in the eyes of TikTok watching It a second or third time because you ask them a question and they're excited that this creator they follow is talking to them and then they're commenting back. And that's going to help the performance of all your content. ([Time 0:19:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/780fface-66e9-41fa-ae55-1b4d61bb4f19)) - **Fill Topical Demand Intentionally** - TikTok constantly seeks fresh videos to satisfy topical demand around trending problems. - Filling that demand with similar, focused content increases chances of being promoted by the algorithm. Transcript: Mike Yanda And because of that short shelf life that we talked about, you have a video go viral and TikTok is immediately looking for another video like that in order to satisfy the demand. Because if somebody watches a piece of content about how to escape 200 view jail or how to go viral on TikTok, then they're going to be interested in more content about that until they Actually have the success and solve that problem for themselves. And so you can have a lot of success by filling that demand. You're paying attention to what is working for other people and you're seeing the videos that they're having a lot of success with, you should be making your versions of those ideas. Because when you do, you're giving TikTok what they want. You're giving them the content that is going to fill the demand for those people in that topic. And that's going to increase your chances of getting the big views. And so that's a big thing. They want people on the platform, but in order to do that, it's not like YouTube where things go up the SEO rankings and search rankings and they can feed the same video for a year. ([Time 0:20:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5c760027-d3b1-4fe0-9ad8-c1a2a1459e6e)) - **Steal Like An Artist: Model Outliers** - Model high-performing videos: save outliers and recreate their headline, hook, and structure for your voice. - Use collections to archive ideas and identify repeatable formats you can adapt quickly. Transcript: Mike Yanda Begin now that we're encouraged? I think the big thing is if you're already posting and you're not getting views, it means that you're not filling that demand. And so you need to pay more attention to what other creators are doing. And if you're just starting, you need to do the same thing. You need to learn the platform. You need to learn what people are just interested in. If you're going to go about this and think, I know who I'm speaking to and I'm going to post the stuff that I feel like posting, you're going to flop and you're going to be stuck in that 200 View jail. You need to learn the skills and you need to learn what people actually want. It's super easy to figure this out because the views are so scattered where it's 200 views, 500 views, thousand, and then people with millions of views or hundreds of thousands of views. And so you can see that. And so all you got to do is pay attention to these other creators in your space and say, like, what are their average views? And look for outliers. If there's a creator that gets one to 2000 views every post, and then they have a video that gets a hundred thousand views, pay attention to that. Michael Stelzner If there's somebody that gets 10 to 50,000 views every post and they get a million views, pay attention to that. What are we looking for? You're looking for those outliers. What I meant is when we watch those videos, what are we looking for those outliers? Mike Yanda Well, the first thing I would do is I would just save them. They have things on TikTok called collections where you can save the video. And so make one that's just ideas or research or name it something and just put them in there. And that way you can go back and you can start watching them and you can look for things that are similar because you'll start to notice patterns. ([Time 0:30:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/79830ceb-6a81-4373-94bb-efa3d67ee257)) - **Curate A Research-Focused Account** - Curate a business-only account and train the For You page by searching keywords and engaging with top content. - Mark irrelevant clips as 'not interested' so TikTok surfaces the most viral niche content for research. Transcript: Mike Yanda Yeah, you kind of give it away. That's exactly what you do. TikTok, that algorithm, if you have ever noticed, like you can watch one video and then you'll start seeing 15 videos on that topic. So you can actually curate your feed. You can basically coach it to show you the most viral content in your niche. And so I would recommend if you're getting on TikTok, like have two accounts, have one that is just for fun and mindless scrolling and have one that's for your business. And on that one, that's for your business, search keywords and terms in your space and watch content that has big views engage with it find followers that you like and can draw inspiration From and follow them or save their content and then when you're in your feed every time you're scrolling if you see a video that you would not create click on it and say you're not interested And if it's a video that like you on the topic you'd be interested in just let it play for a little bit because you can do this for 10 to 15 minutes. And then every single time you log on to TikTok, the very first video you're going to see is probably a video that has a ton of views. That's very recent. ([Time 0:34:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b6d270e9-f3fe-4127-b9d0-50e90b69b522)) - **Be Consistent To Teach The Algorithm** - Stay topically consistent so TikTok can categorize you and serve your videos to the right audience. - Keep posting within your niche and avoid unrelated posts that confuse the algorithm. Transcript: Mike Yanda If you're trying to grow a fitness business to help moms lose weight, don't be sharing your shopping haul. Don't be sharing your home decor stuff or the other things that you're interested in. If you want to share those, save it for your stories. Don't put it on your feed because the content that you're posting on your feed is going to teach the algorithm like what they should show you to and so this is something i maybe we should Have mentioned earlier but like tiktok's going to try and categorize you and so one of the big reasons you might not be getting views is because they're not showing your content to the Right people and the main reason that happens is because you're not being consistent with the topic that you're talking about and so if you're that online fitness coach and you post A fitness video and it does well, but then the next video you talk about more general, like being a mom stuff and like your favorite brand of diapers or whatever, well, that content is Going to land, but it's going to be shown to the people interested in the fitness stuff and they're going to swipe past it. And now the next time you post a video, TikTok's back at square one. And it's like, I don't even know who to show your content to. And so you want to be posting consistently on your topic in the feed. And even when you're not getting views, don't delete your videos. The videos can take off later, but every video you post gives data to the algorithm about who you are, who you talk to, and who they should show your content to. And so what happens is, let's say you post 10 videos and none of them are getting good views, but you're consistent. Well, they're learning a little bit and maybe there's people that are watching in that 200. ([Time 0:36:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8de3bc7b-74a4-46a5-89cb-f18dc0a66543)) - **Remaking A Viral Format Scaled Fast** - A mindset coach remade an underperforming creator's viral idea and gained millions of views in 48 hours. - He then repeatedly remade the format and continued to score viral results across multiple attempts. Transcript: Mike Yanda Awesome content, but he was just sharing kind of whatever he wanted. And I remember being on a zoom call with him and he was really frustrated. And I was like, let me just show you, like, let me walk you through the process of like how I would research and create content. And so we started searching, you know, and finding creators. And I was like, Hey, look at this creator here. She does not have a big audience. It was like 3000, something like that. She had this one really big video. And so I was like, take this video because it's perfect for you. And I just want you to make your version of it. And it's the same thing that I said with that modeling, like use that headline, use like the same kind of description. Like that first line is the one they see in the video, like use that. And then the rest of your description, put it in your own words and then use her hook and just share. She had this many points, like share your points. If you agree with them, you can put them. If not, just like, it's not word for word, but you're, you're making your version of it. And this was the craziest thing. Like he took that research video and he made it the next day. And in a 48 hour period, he got millions of views on that video and like 12,000 followers. ([Time 0:38:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bab4bf66-e4b6-4df1-b2ca-cb4a571454ed)) - **Scale By Replaying Your Best Content** - Play your greatest hits: remake your best-performing videos regularly to scale growth. - Repurpose the same hooks and headlines across related topics to create templates that reliably perform. Transcript: Mike Yanda Content. There's so often that I work with somebody and I look at their page and they, you know, they're getting no views and they have this one video that got 10,000 views and they never talked About that topic again, ever, you know, or somebody that, you know, has like a million view video and then did nothing with it. And it just doesn't make sense to me. Like when you have that, that's a signal. And so I've mentioned outliers a few times, but I feel like there's two categories of outliers. There's early on when you don't know what works for you. And so you're looking to other people to see what works for them. And you're modeling it in order to figure out what works for you and develop your voice. And that whole time when you're modeling, it's like that steel like an artist thing. You're learning what makes a good idea, what makes a good hook, what kind of formats of content happen over and over. You're kind of just absorbing those skills just through the act of doing it. But then eventually you have a video hit and go viral. And now you can take that and you can remake it again. And then as you have more videos go viral, you might have three, four, five, six videos that always do numbers for you and that you can just remake every month. ([Time 0:41:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9ebb1948-9f63-422d-a2f7-4238a0aff768))