During the three years I stopped doing social media roles (at The Audience Agency and Canon) TikTok basically exploded and shortform video took over, leaving me feeling a bit like a coal miner who woke up one day and realised the country runs on solar power.

So I started a history-focused TikTok to fuck about and test ideas on, and it just passed the magic 10K follower count, has about 273K Likes and is part of the creator rewards programme. Not as good as a lot of accounts but I’ll take it.

Here’s my main takeaways:

• I don’t post every day, I just post when I have a good idea. I do a video when I have time, which is usually 1-2 a month, and on a good day I can script and edit a video within an hour. Perfect is the enemy of good etc.

• I don’t do TikTok dances, skits or trends. After some extremely shit early videos I’ve settled on meme image carousels and voiceovers using B-roll I shoot whenever I visit a heritage site. That’s always done better than using second-hand images and video from the internet. Memes will only take you so far though - the ‘meatier’ content that actually explores a topic brings in more followers.

• Capcut is my lord and saviour and I hate using Premiere now. The automatic captioning is worth the subscription.

• The algorithm, despite its flaws, is like no other platform for reaching not just new audiences but audiences who are interested in what you talk about. But the necessity of gathering enough likes/shares/comments/favourites to tip you into featuring on the For You Page means you have to focus 80% of effort on your hook. The general rule of thumb seems to be that if you get <10% of Likes vs. Views then your video is dead in the water.

• I’ve put around £100 into boosting which really helps get your account off the ground at the start. Logically, it helps when you think your video is good but needs a kick to be seen by more people, and a waste of money when the video is crap to begin with. But I often work with teams who are reluctant to invest in their content when, really, with the money we spend on things like consultants (*cough*) and capital development, a tenner for a boost is peanuts.

What it’s reinforced for me is that there is an audience out there and TikTok is very effective at finding it for you. But to find them you have to relentlessly gear your content to what people will find relevant, funny, inspiring and interesting. And even then most of your content will flop, but maybe one in ten will explode. 249K of my 273K Likes come from just four videos - two were proper stories, one was a vibes meme and one was about current events.

It’s also reinforced for me that when you strip away everything that gets in the way of just creating content your audience wants - the bureaucracy, the stakeholders, the ‘have to post’ posts, the endless reporting, the pressure to succeed (which simultaneously makes experimentation feel risky) - there’s nothing stopping cultural organisations conquering TikTok.

Content of this week

• A better-than-usual take on the ‘social media team is on holiday’ bit from Historic Royal Palaces.

• You should definitely get your staff to draw something related to your organisation. The European Space Agency staff are actually pretty good at drawing spaceships.

• This is my exact experience of visiting Tate Modern.

• This TikTok video perfectly straddles the line between insider joke and mass appeal meme. I don’t know how people find the perfect audio for these things - do you just bookmark stuff you find as you go and hope you find the content to match?

• Sex may sell, but poo is always popular.

The bullet point bit

• As a nice chaser to the shot of my TikTok intro, the EU want to label addictive design as a systemic risk under the Digital Services Act - i.e. the infinite scroll puts you into a zombie-like scroll-state and that maybe isn’t a good thing.

• There’s also a case in the USA against social media companies, accusing them of harm through addictive design and algorithms. If it succeeds it means they can’t just rely on the ‘we just host the content’ argument and may have to change how entire platforms are designed.

• Draw a horse and watch it gallop majestically across your screen with all the other little horses.

• If you’re not automatically putting audio onto your carousels to turn them into Reels then you should start. It’s worked for Ned Potter.

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

We’re watching The Beauty which is good but not as good as The Substance, but still good enough. For some reason I can suspend my belief for the exploding sex virus, but I couldn’t for a very cliche fight/chase scene in the second episode. You’re telling me the streets of Venice are deserted? In a city where tourists are tearing it apart? And that builders leave pallets of bricks suspended in the air with a single rope, ready to fall on villains?

🐕 Keith

Here he is