Finding Your Voice on TikTok

[Music] thank you this is finding your voice on tick tock my name is Grace Curtis I am the pr and Community manager at Future Friends games which is a publishing and promotion hybrid company based in the United Kingdom in terms of why the hell I'm even qualified to be talking about this with my time at Future friends I've had the opportunity to work and help grow a great number of really interesting fantastic Tick Tock accounts so in terms of the publishing side of the company I helped work on games like xo1 omno and through our many wonderful clients it was uh clone down in the danger zone vampire survivors hype train Heavenly Bodies yada yada and as you can see the numbers we're

able to achieve were pretty good across the board um over 150 000 followers for extra one over 200 000 for omno many many more Heavenly Bodies Hit 1.3 million on our first post which I was very proud of um and our biggest video overall was the x01 launch Tick Tock which got 9 million views organically and we were able to achieve this without spending a single penny on ads or you know promotion within Tick Tock we did all of this organically and furthermore we kind of had to do it in our spare time we're a really small company and we have a lot of stuff to do and uh so this was all kind of achieved on a shoestring budget both in terms of money and time for a more recent example of a tick tock that did really really well so this is from our upcoming game Europa which is hopefully gonna be out this year see if it wants to play [Music]

lovely um and that got 900 000 views last time I checked so still got it Tick Tock all right I'm sure you've heard of it if you haven't um congratulations on Bravely walking into this room not knowing what you're about to see it is a video sharing platform and it's a pretty big deal last year 2022 it was the most downloaded app uh in the world it's got about a billion monthly users and the people who are on Tick Tock are mostly very young and digitally literate a recent report by the New York Times found that about 40 of people with Gen people uh who are in the Generation Z so that's me the Zoomers are using apps like Tick Tock and Instagram instead of Google so they're hustling in on Google's territory which is how you know this is a big deal um

Zuma stocks they uh yeah uh the thing that makes Tech talk special is the thing that most people really struggle to understand about it which is a for you page rather than showing you content by people you follow when you open up Tick Tock what you get is a stream of seemingly random videos but the more time you spend on the app as you interact with those videos liking commenting or swiping on past the tick tock algorithm will monitor that information and use it to further curate your feed so the more time you spend on Tick Tock the better the platform becomes this is how we were able to achieve those really big organic numbers that I told you about before it's by getting on people's for you pages and that's kind of what I'm going to talk about today how to do that in a way that isn't um Shady embarrassing cringe or just difficult about those numbers right I obviously shouldn't have to explain to you the benefit of having nine million people see your game but it's still worth uh Drilling in a little bit so this is a graph showing wish list activity on the x01 steam page beginning

uh in May 2021 first time when we first started the tick tock account and running all the way up to launch um I should probably explain before we go in further what a wish list is for those of you don't know you can essentially think of it as sort of a tier below a pre-order it's a button that you can click on a steam page which will basically say to steam hey I'm not willing to put money on the line just yet but I might potentially want to buy this game somewhere down the line so when the game launches they get an email they get another one when it goes on sale as a Indie developers in this PC space this is kind of the best tool that we have to figure out how well something is going to do prior to actually putting it on sale and there is also something that steam uses to decide what kind of positioning to give your game within the steam storefront so you get a lot of wish lists your game gets good featuring on Steam which then gets it more wish lists yada yada wishlists are very very good I was able to map the witch list activity on the xo1 steam page pretty consistently to the viral videos that we

had over that time period you can see got a nice big spike with our first ever video there I had another viral video a little while later which didn't convert quite as well a whole bunch of little bumps and then we had a nice bike when we put the games demo on the next Fest and then an even bigger one when we advertise that demo on tick tock uh so and uh when we launched X1 we had 100 000 wish lists which for a little game like that from a solo developer with a publisher that was like five people at the time was really amazing and uh I really think the numbers show that Tick Tock contributed to us having that if you want an even stalker example of this this is a graph that was kindly donated to me by Keeler she's a developer of a game called Mail Time uh Keeler has a fantastic Tick Tock account you should all check out uh but you can see here the wishlist spikes Aquila gets from a big Tick Tock so these are all have got about 1 million views each but the wishlist conversion is about the same as she got from the future game show at Gamescom

so uh yes in summary provided that you make good use of the single link that Tick Tock allows you to have in your bio you can see real tangible growth from this platform whoa so I think one of the things aside from just fear of embarrassment what keeps a lot of developers off Tick Tock is just not knowing where to begin so before we dive into the nitty-gritty I just really wanted to quickly share with you my workflow um sounds are the backbone of tick tock it's one of the few social media platforms where people actually engage with the sounds and so in my opinion that's where you should begin if you don't know where to start you can get a sound either from The Tick Tock app itself or you can download it from YouTube take that sound take whatever footage you want to use and go over to uh your preferred video editing software do all the fiddly stuff uh on your computer because if you try to edit the entire thing in The Tick Tock in-app editor you will go insane once that's done and you have like a bit of video that you're happy with take it

back to tick tock and this is the tricky bit and this is the part that I always have to explain to clients you then want to find whatever sound you're using in The Tick Tock Sound Library put it back in the video this is a way of for example if you're using like a doji cat sound you want to find that doji cat sound in the library put it in the video and have it as a soundtrack therefore other people who are enjoying that same wonderful little bit of music will be recommended uh your content then now that's tricky bits done you start having fun do cap cut edits which is a new feature where you can have a kind of editing format put in the video for you or you can do green screen or you can do silly voices like whatever fun ridiculous thing you want to have do that in the tick tock editor and the last thing you do before you upload add a caption like I said before a lot of young people using uh tiktok to kind of search for things similar to Google and they also have kind of an SEO system so drop a couple keywords into the caption choose a couple cool hashtags and then upload the video sit back and wait to go viral uh

and wait and wait and wait uh because it's not going to happen right away Tick Tock is really hard and there's like a thousands and thousands of people uploading videos every single day so how do you stand out You Stand Out by blending in counterintuitive I know but uh this is something that we've learned over time so for example one of the first things we do when we have like a brand new tech Talk account for a game that no one's ever seen before is upload a trailer because a trailer is a really nice asset it's you know why wouldn't you put it on another platform right that's exactly what we did with exit one we uploaded two extremely beautiful trailers to the account and they wound up getting I think about 29 000 views each which is great but compared to an account where most of the videos got hundreds of thousands it's a significant over performance on over underperformance and the reason I believe for this is Tick Tock has a young audience right and the thing about young people people of you know that kind of late 90s early 2000s milieu is that we have been

bombarded with advertising from pretty much the second we opened our little eyes and saw the world and we are really really good at detecting it anything that looks too polished sounds too nice has too much you know effort and money put into it our brain goes that's advertising and we will flicker right right and the whole point of tick tock is you don't want people to do that so uh how do you keep people from switching off your video right away this is a point so important that I've given its own slide make a tick tock that looks like a tick tock uh obviously seems stupid right how do you do that how do you make a tick tock that looks like a tick tock I'll tell you there's three words in it low production value why go to the studio and film yourself in like a bunch of nice cameras when you could just put your phone on your dresser and talk straight to the camera why use OBS when you could just film your screen as long as you are using the tools that a teenager with zero resources would use

you will look like you blend in uh at its most simple blending in can literally just be the thing that I showed you before with that Europa video which is a short unbroken clip of gameplay and the reason this works where tightly edited trailers do not is that instead of speaking in the language of advertisements you're speaking in the language of Let's Plays and twitch streams in short you look like you belong the next thing I want to dive into is trends so Tick Tock was originally a karaoke app and music is still very much woven into the DNA of how Tick Tock functions so on tiktok you will have these things called viral sounds which is basically a single sound clip that is being reused over multiple videos and this could be anything it could be you know a little bit of a song it could be a bit of a comedy skit it could be Louis through rapping auto-tuned to pashbelle's Canon I don't know why that one did so well but God we had a whole month of Louis through uh and uh the point is these can imply either a certain format to the video or just a certain vibe

but they give you uh a sort of weight a format to map your video onto right um this uh not only will give you like a lot of ideas if you're running out of ideas and it will not only make you look like you belong on Tick Tock it will also help you find an audience again through the aforementioned algorithms all about giving Tick Tock little signals as to who they want to show the video to uh finding Trends is a full-time job Tick Tock uh my boss Thomas reisenegger I hope you just saw his talk before he's the absolute Master at doing this and so he very kindly donated to me this list if anyone wants to take a picture these are the accounts that Thomas uses to kind of spot Trends ahead of time uh so that's how he does it I have a different strategy which is that I had no life and I'm just on Tick Tock all the time and really there is no replacement for just being immersed in the app every social media app has its own Cadence you know like on Twitter you have to sound like sanctimonious and annoying

Etc the more you immerse yourself in Tick Tock the easier it will be able to come to match the Cadence of the platform so yeah get on that start watching and soon you too will become completely insufferable like me uh to make the next point I want to show you another Tick Tock video this is from the X1 account it's a video that got 1.7 million views [Music] foreign [Music] about that video is the visuals Tick Tock is first and foremost a dopamine treadmill and it encourages you to make snap decisions about whether or not what you're looking at is for you you are literally competing with n plus one

people all the time so showing something good in the first second is Paramount visually compelling games like XL1 like omno have an obviously massive advantage in this field but remember kids ugly games go viral too what you have to do is just show them something visually compelling be it beautiful funny weird whatever it is just have it on screen right away if you're not showing them your lovely face you have to give them something cool to look at the other thing that we do in that video is we establish context because of the way Tick Tock works the vast majority of people who view your video will be viewing that thing for the first time they have no idea who you are so you need to communicate two things right away one that what they're seeing is a game and two that it is a game that you have made uh it's easy to forget this because we are surrounded by gay people all the time but this is a really cool thing to do for a living and uh if you express it this is a game that you have helped create not only will you put yourself in

a position of authority you're also like Peak people's curiosity right away they will make a connection with you and be compelled to hopefully find out more up next the power of Personality um so Victoria Tran who is like an incredible uh Powerhouse Community manager from innisloth last year released a fantastic post-mortem of the Among Us Tick Tock account and one of the things she found in that post-mortem is that uh while updates for Among Us got the best view numbers personality driven content so that's just Victoria clowning around on the phone uh those got the best engagement and having been working on Tech talk for like over two years now the power of personality is something that I think really really holds up most of the really big Powerhouse video game accounts are ones that make use of a human voice and a friendly face you know so example landfall 1.5 million followers tiny Glade that's another recent hit they both have kind of a

human presence on all or most of their videos however um you don't have to be hugely charismatic in order for this to work so most of the X1 account videos were similar to the thing you just saw just uh footage in text right but we were able to persuade developer J to lend his voice to two videos and he read uh those words out in his best doll I don't want to be here Australian monotone and they got uh 2.7 and 9 million views respectively making them the highest performing videos on the entire account the appeal of tick tock I think is fundamentally the same as the appeal of YouTube and twitch and Twitter and everything else which is that it is a friend in your pocket if you want to watch a trailer and read a press release there are an infinite number of places where you can go and do that but the opportunity you have the thing you can offer people here is a chance to make a really small but meaningful connection with the real human beings who make the stuff they love and if you can offer that to people you will get yourself not

just a viewer but an audience member hopefully next up watch times this is uh some data that was very kindly donated to me by Jared of um devolver he did a really fantastic Deep dive into uh one and a half thousand different Tick Tock accounts from Indie Games and one of his many findings was that uh watch time and total watch percentage have a strong correlation with how many views a video gets overall and this has been backed up by an investigation from The Wall Street Journal a couple years ago which again found that full watch percentage is at the heart of how Tick Tock decides whether or not your video is worth putting on people's pages so in short whether or not people get to the end of your video and whether or not they then go back and watch it again is a really significant factor in how well you're going to do now obviously figuring out how to make people watch your stuff to the end is like the question and you could ask 100 Community managers and get 101 different responses but I have

a theory which is I believe that it boils down to structure structure is in setup and payoff a two-part structure so Howard started versus how it's going it's a phrase that you see all over the place on tick tock not just in the indie game sphere and the reason I think that people keep using this over and over again is because it works really well uh you give people the promise of something cool while showing them something intriguing and if you can pay off that promise with something cool your goal that you've fulfilled your contract as a uh you know three second bit of entertainment for them but of course that is only one way that you can use the sort of setup and payoff method there's kind of infinite ways to apply this if you really think about it lists is an absolute classic one you know three fantastic environments in my game and then you show three fantastic environments or three funny glitches yada yada um most jokes have a one-two setup you know show something serious and then

contrast it with something silly we love to do this for vampire survivors works like a charm um and of course you have the Q a format tiktok has a native feature where people can leave questions and you can answer that question with a video which means you're basically giving them the setup and payoff almost at the same time and if you're feeling really bold you can combine multiple formats so this video we have here is the tick tock video we made announcing that vampire survivors was coming to Xbox where I combined a q a format feature with a funny trending sound at the time let's watch it together now [Music] coming to Xbox November 10th foreign that video got almost as many views as the official XBox trailer on the official Xbox YouTube account and it took me 25 minutes to make and

most of that time was spent making the bats so uh yeah set up and pay off it works my uh final clothing thought the sort of thing that I want to leave you with to chew over as you go have your coffees and hang out is uh stick with it finding your voice finding your tone finding your workflow all of this stuff takes time so be kind to yourself as far as we can tell Tick Tock does not penalize you for failing if you make a bunch of videos that no one sees that doesn't affect the likelihood of your next video doing well and I know this because that's exactly what happened with x01 right me and Thomas were having a competition to see who could go viral first but everything we posted just got like a couple thousand views very depressing and then after I think about a half dozen tries suddenly overnight half a million so yeah keep trying fall on your face fail pick yourself up try again um it's a dancing app for children uh don't get too stressed about it uh it's it's more about it's just about

creating a single perfect thing than it is about spinning through that wheel enough times until you get uh you hit on something that works now because of that algorithm-driven format everything that you start you you have a blank slate not just with every account but with every video that you post um which is obviously really exhausting and frustrating at times yes but uh it means that you also have an infinite amount of Fresh Starts and that you never know what's going to happen next uh and Yep this is just some of the sources I use so Jared Victoria Thomas Wall Street Journal um yes that that's uh that's my talk thanks so much everyone [Applause] wow I zoomed through that super fast I was talking uh talking super Speedy but

yes if anyone has any questions I think we have time now I have a question about length of videos because you mentioned watch percentage heavily correlates with performance so immediate logic is make a really short video does that work or not I think that was another thing this is you should uh go back and read Jared's talk because this is something he went into as well there is kind of a sweet spot which I believe is at around the 15 to 30 second Mark but it's not a huge Factor if you have a really fantastic 30 second video I think you still have a good choice of that don't just upload a bunch of two second clips and hope that people don't get the time to get past because I'm pretty sure Tick Tock has allowed for that to not happen but yeah we tend to hit around the 15 to 30 second Mark and we find that works pretty well consistently thank you no worries over there all right thanks so much for the talk no worries I was wondering our future friends how much do you guys focus on uh post timing like what day or what hour of that day uh posting certain videos do you guys just post whenever and let it go viral uh we do I think we tend to aim for like late afternoon

early evening just anecdotally that's when we found videos tend to do their best because that's when people are kind of online we also think really hard about regions so uh take talks that are posted from like North America in the UK have a tendency to reach more people than those who've you know uploaded from Europe because it's set to your VPN um not your VPN your IP address but uh it's all kind of a black magic like we don't have hard data on when's best or not but yeah posting the video when roughly you think that people are going to be online and posting it from a country where a lot of people live generally Works us no worries uh thanks very much for the talk do you find in Practical terms it's better to have a publisher account or a developer account or a personal account or account per game um that's that's the big question I mean we've had Success With both formats the one thing I'll say um having a business account I think it's helpful for ads but it imposes a lot of uh limitations in terms of what sounds you use so we find it easier to go viral with like a personal non-business count

um but again because of that format where everything is being kind of seen for the first time so when we worked on the hype train they obviously have a whole bunch of different games and we were able to kind of go viral with a bunch of different individual videos right so we had one introducing Euro Truck World another one introducing uh void train and they kind of did well individually however if you want to if basically if you want to do a landfall or do an inner sloth where you have kind of an audience that you're gathering over time and kind of earning their trust uh it's probably better to focus on one game at a time per account thank you very much hi hello uh sorry uh before you uh recommended to edit uh Outside The Tick Tock platform because like you would be crazy otherwise uh but you also recommended to like kind of blend in and have a low production value by not editing too much so well do you like draw the line uh I mean again that's like a really open question I think if you look at uh something like Cult of the Lamb they have really fantastic videos which actually have quite a high production value and they get away with that because the game is extremely beautiful and entertaining and they make

excellent content um for me what I tend to do is I I like the uh the work to be kind of invisible so I want the cups to be really smooth I want the gameplay to be really clear that's kind of thing that people take for granted essentially but uh once I have something that sort of matches very well to the beat of the song then um I take that to tick tock and I do the kind of Scrappy stuff on there but I think that's really more about what kind of ceiling how much time you have like I'm not a professional video editor and I tend to not have a huge amount of time to do these things so that's where I'd personally draw the line but I think it's a case of figuring out what works for you over time thank you always hi um how do you feel about content re-sharing so you have previously shared a video and it was a success or a failure and you re-share it like let me rework a second time and can it beat the first pillar oh that's a good question um do you mean like re-sharing on Tick Tock or re-sharing on um it's not something we've done a lot to be honest it's something that kind of leaves a bad

taste in my mouth I would rather try again with something new than to kind of keep uploading the same thing over and over again I um however resharing on YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and Tick Tock and Reddit and other places I really strongly recommend you do um we've actually had quite a modest good amount of success with vampire survivors review sharing on YouTube shorts so yeah I would I would recommend doing that but for the most part I would rather pour that energy into just like making and having another attempt with something quick okay thanks no worries I agree talk thank you I'd like to ask for a social for a very specific problem uh we live in a non-english speaking country and when he post a tick tock it gets shown to people from our own country so if we make it in our local language it will never go to Global audience obviously and if we Post in English we

have pretty bad engagement so do you have a solution for this problem Maybe this isn't this is the Eternal question I think generally what we would recommend you do is just write hire a community manager in the UK and have them post from there that's what I think the reason that you're probably getting bad engagement on those videos is that even though they're in the English language they're getting still getting shown to like local audiences so you kind of you're kind of damned if you do damned if you don't right because if you make a video in the native language you're reaching less people but if you make a video in English you're sort of not speaking in the language of your local community so annoyingly it does help to just kind of either do a bit of subterfuge with a VPN or posts from a different region okay thanks no worries oh I think that will be oh easy and we're supposed to Ultimate I think she was first okay cool um no worse um you mentioned YouTube shorts and we know that uh tick tock's very open to letting people download and share on other platforms how what have

you seen in terms of being able to track analytics or how that goes on to other non-tick Tock platforms and how that you know I mean we haven't done like a real for us this has just basically been it doesn't take a lot of time and there's no drawbacks so just throw it out there we haven't looked super hard frankly because the performance has not been impressive enough for us to really want to Deep dive into reels or shorts just yet I think if we started seeing numbers that were comparable to what we were seeing on Tick Tock we might pay more attention but for now it's more just a matter of um giving ourselves sort of a wider just just a bigger shot right um but yeah Tick Tock is still very much the number one platform for us and that has the uh the massive organic reach that we just don't have anywhere else thank you no worries hi thank you so much for your talk um you show at the very beginning pretty Beauty for a correlation between uh the videos and the whistling and my question is do you have more information about this whistling I mean

profile are they uh what is the convention rate are they high profile uh customer I mean we all know it's important to have which listing for the position and on this team but beside that they finally compared how is chancy yes the conversion is worse yes 100 I think wishlist conversions from Tick Tock are generally not as strong as when you build up a personal brand elsewhere and this is you know something that comes up a lot with people like oh yes you got 5 000 wishlists that you wouldn't have had elsewhere but um you know they're not as good and it's like yes they are not as good however the choice between the choice of like not having those wish lists and having another 5 000 that are not as good I'll take the ladder right um so yeah it is it is weaker conversion sadly but I think it's kind of worth making that bargain just to have uh that extra profile especially considering how it will contribute to your game being promoted within Steam uh we still think it's worth it yep absolutely yes to say the expectations yeah yeah I have a

thousands of persons with the listing but then they only convert one percent so yes exactly thank you no worries hello uh where are you actually making the the ask for someone to wish list you know in the video in your bio in the description uh we tend to have it in the bio um we again I think Thomas made a great point in the talk he did before mine which is that you shouldn't Hammer home too much with the chords to action because for people people on Tick Tock are so apathetic and disengaged that if you ask them to actually click on something else or they'll be like oh no um so it's better to do uh engagement farming asking would you play this or what do you want to see next kind of things and you know get more engagement and then the few number of people who are actually curious enough to click through the profile that's when you hit them with the wish list and give them the link and you want to have as little friction as possible between that action of going to the bio and getting to the steam page to hit the link so that's what you should focus on all right thank you no worries hello about no do you think about people

playing your game being able to make tick-tockable content from the game or you mostly focused on you posting the videos uh yeah it's not something we consider to be honest I mean the the tick tock um like influencer world is something that's still growing and we're still kind of figuring out what that looks like right um so we generally try and focus on just making something that's really beautiful and compelling and easy for from our perspective and uh we still see the best again that guy said in terms of conversion making a game that performs really well on Twitch and YouTube for an influencers standpoint is still kind of more beneficial to us um but it's not something that you optimize for oh God no no no we don't we don't like go to any devs and say you should do this because it's better for tick tock right we don't want to um hamper people's artistic Vision like that it's more about trying to tailor the approach uh to whatever the game is like some games are just not a good fit for tick tock honestly like you know strategy games anything that has a huge amount of information on screen uh stuff that's not you know you can't sort of instantly pass you're gonna have a harder time with it but uh so yeah we

more try to tailor our campaign to take to the game rather than the other way around thank you you talked about followers watch time views what is the main kpi you follow to check if your what you're doing is sorry can you repeat that what is the main Gap G indicator Factor key performance indicator following that really like like for instance you talked about followers is that super important uh it helps it helps yes but um unfortunately again because of that 40 page thing you can actually have a lot of followers and still have a lot of Duds so we just tend to look at each video individually and then use followers as a kind of rough indicator of how we're doing on like a big uh on like a bigger scale but yeah you can have a lot of throttle you can have a lot of followers and have a lot of Duds you can have no followers and do really well so while that kind of indicates our growth over time we don't use that too much as a metric of like how well we're doing uh we just try to think about what we're going to do next

ultimately thank you I think we have do we have time for one more or okay one more thank you thank you uh so uh this is sort of branching off the earlier question about having your game designed for Tick-Tock ability so if we're working on a mobile game um where it's uh in Lance and we're taking that sort of tick tock ability into account but one question is our stuff is uh is landscape and Tick Tock is obviously Fortress so uh just curious if you have any thoughts on that uh would you just do sort of like closer in shots so that it you always get something in portrait or or does it work to put a landscape video you know fitting in the portrait it's Yeah It's Tricky I think we do a little bit of both um I would recommend you go and have a look at the Clone drone in the danger zone Tick Tock account because that's a VR game right now I mean they've turned into a VR game and what they typically do is they kind of pick out the most important bit of action they zoom in on that and then they have

a kind of desaturated sort of version of the video that takes up the rest of the space um so you do if you're gonna have like black bars either side of the video I think sometimes it can be fine use that information well right so like put some good text there maybe a good call to action use it as best you can um yeah and think about your game from the perspective of someone who has uh no attention span whatsoever would be recommended what was it what was the game that you said clone drone in the danger zone so they do a lot of clever visual tricks to kind of fill up the screen even though it's a landscape game got it thank you yes I think that's all done thank you so much everyone um I will be hanging around for a chats afterwards but cheers [Music] thank you