At Insider our overall goal is to meet the audience where they are. Our goal on TikTok is to cultivate and connect with a Gen Z audience, producing educational content that leaves them with new knowledge they didn’t have before watching. We aimed for 4 million followers across the platform by Q3 of 2022. Additionally, we wanted our audience to remain engaged with the content by commenting and sharing our videos.
Insider’s TikTok accounts were created in 2019, before the explosion of users during the COVID lockdowns in 2020. Because of this head start, we had time to experiment and find our niche. We found that videos that were 45 seconds or less and told a complete story with an educational angle, were our top performers. We consistently posted at a cadence of 2 to 3 videos per week and utilized all the tools native to TikTok including: adding text-on-screen in-app, using their commercial music library, including thumbnail text, and creating playlists. We focused on telling a complete story on TikTok in a succinct manner instead of directing our audience to another platform. Through this strategy, our followers were able to learn from us and see us as an authority on the subject being discussed. Along the way however, we faced several challenges such as capturing our audience’s attention and keeping them engaged with the storytelling the moment a video begins. We overcame this by immediately telling viewers what they would learn in the video with voiceover and a title on screen in the first second. Another obstacle was creating vertical video from footage and photos that were not formatted for the platform. To resolve this, we got creative with how we showed the footage by using methods like blurred backgrounds and pans.
By investing our resources in TikTok, we were able to quickly grow an audience and even gain brand recognition from TikTok itself. Insider has been part of two partnership programs with the social platform, which include the Creative Learning Fund and the Instructive Accelerator Program. On top of that, we surpassed our goal of 4 million followers at the end of Q1 in 2022. Our viewers are highly engaged with the content and regularly start discussions in the comment sections of our videos. We have been successful on TikTok because we recognized early on that this platform would be significant with our readership. As a result, Insider has become a well-known name on the platform and has cultivated an audience that returns to our accounts and videos time and time again.
