**Content Portfolio**

I. Don’t Start a New Account Until You’ve Done These Things

Priming Your Account

Before you upload your first post, it’s essential to spend at least two weeks exploring relevant creators and trends. Engage with others in your niche to make sure TikTok understands where to place your account. By the time you post your first video, your FYP must be full of content from your chosen niche. Otherwise, your videos won’t be sent out to the right audience.

To be successful on TikTok, you need to be watching content on the platform daily.

Understanding the TikTok Algorithm

Three main factors determine whether your content lands on the FYP:

  1. Authority Ranking
  2. Community Guidelines Compliance
  3. AI and Human Review

Authority Ranking

TikTok scores creators based on engagement, so starting a new account with high-quality content is essential. As your engagement and follower count grow, so does your chance of going viral with future posts.

What affects your Authority Ranking?

AI and Human Review

Your video is initially shown to a small group. If it’s engaging and meets the guidelines, it gets pushed out to more people. Breaking the rules, or ‘community guidelines’, however, can severely limit your video’s reach, so it’s important to be aware of these.

II. Organic Reach & The Viral Formula

This is just a term that means how many people you can reach for free. Achieving high organic reach isn’t easy, which is why so many brands struggle to go viral. With the amount of competition for viewers’ attention, you have roughly two seconds before they lose interest and scroll. In a digital marketing degree, they’ll teach you that the way to do this is to use a clear call to action and a visual hook at the start. But in reality, this often isn’t enough, and it goes much deeper than that.

I’ll use the video I made for Dash Burger below as an example. To the untrained eye, this just looks like a nice burger video with an interesting story, but there are multiple elements designed to help it go viral:

https://www.tiktok.com/@dashburgerdublin/video/7175089190856559878

This video has five hooks occurring simultaneously

  1. Visual: The low “hero” angle, combined with the sped-up smash, is the most visually interesting part of the video, but it’s combined with the comment and video captions. This is a lot of information to take in at once, but encourages you to keep watching.
  2. Audio: This is one of the most important factors for going viral, and it’s often overlooked. I’ve spent more than two hours on some occasions finding the right audio to match a video. Clips and movement are all syncopated to the beat of the music, and I often use five-measure phrasing (which is just a music theory term that creates tension)This works as a subconscious hook and helps the video feel more dynamic. I also overlaid the sizzling sound to add another layer. The sound on the Dash Burger video was later removed for copyright, but here’s a good example from Bunsen.
  3. Emotional: The comment about onions that this video replies to was staged. This is designed to evoke a strong emotional reaction. Half of the comments hated onions, the other half loved them, and it sparks discussion in the comments. The attention isn’t on the burger itself, so it doesn’t damage the brand.
  4. Text: The captions are intentionally fast-moving so viewers may pause the video to read them. Without changing the meaning, I slightly embellished the language to encourage discussion. Instead of saying “we cook for 30 seconds on one side,” I said “we cook 70% on one side to ensure maximum surface area crust.”
  5. Taste: Sensory imagery can be a very useful tool. “Steam flavour into the bun” is something I completely made up, but it adds to the olfactory and kinaesthetic hooks.

This has 26 million views, and generated a 40% sales increase for Dash Burger and even some press coverage