On TikTok as soon as you find “silent reviews” of books made with mime, such as young people pouring ketchup in their hair or parents throwing slices of cheese in their children’s faces. Millions of users are trying to go viral and make a name for themselves on the social network. Bad news: there is no secret formula to success. The number of videos published per day, their duration or the time at which they are shared has no influence, according to a company spokesperson. What tricks do work? Three tiktokers with thousands of followers share their experience.
Nuria Adraos (@nuria.adraos.makeup)
What Nuria Adraos does on TikTok is simply incredible. She either becomes the genie of Aladdin or Dumbo, Olaf, Jack Sparrow, the Corpse Bride, Dori or the Pink Panther. This 23-year-old professional makeup artist seems to work magic with her pencils and brushes. She debuted on TikTok in 2020. “My mother created it to make a trend and I uploaded several videos that she had saved,” she remembers. Quickly, her posts garnered thousands of views. She was growing unstoppably and perfecting her videos. So much so that TikTok has awarded her as the best content creator in the last two years. Fashion and beauty in the referring category.
Adraos spends the day watching movies and cartoon series. From there he gets ideas for his TikToks. He records them in his room, with several spotlights and a camera, and teaches the makeup process little by little. He doesn’t always write a script. He usually does it when content includes a lot of makeup so that everything fits together well. “It takes me the same time to record a video as it takes me to do makeup, between 8 and 12 hours, and to edit it, about 40 minutes,” he explains. Although there are more complicated videos of many makeups that take him months to record.
The creator does not make money with TikTok because she does not have monetization activated, but she does promote products from some brands. She also does not use hashtags, viral music or effects to increase the visibility of the videos. “The most common mistake that users make is to focus on numbers, statistics, virality, followers… When you create content to receive certain results, you lose the perception of things and the possibility of enjoying 100% of what you do.” That is a “direct path to frustration”: “Trends change, what is viral today is no longer viral tomorrow. “You can’t spend all day thinking about what people are going to like and forget about what you like.”
For her, the key to success on the social network is originality. “There was no one who did makeup that way,” she says. Over time, there have been some changes to the platform. At first it was much easier to go viral because “everything was new and there were many fewer creators.” But “now a lot of people do the same thing, therefore, you have to stretch your mind a lot more if you want to do something unique that no one has done.”
Patricia Fernández (@patriciafedz)
“The day that Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí got together, salseo was invented.” This is how one of Patricia Fernández’s most viral TikToks begins. This 25-year-old journalist with more than 420,000 followers on TikTok believes that there is an important segment of the population that likes classic culture. She attributes the success of her videos to knowing how to choose a good story, storytelling and being natural: “On the one hand, the novelty of what she had was combined with the way she did it, adapting the codes of current communication. She put C. Tangana and Lorca in the same sentence and no one was scandalized or, at least, it didn’t sound dissonant.
To find topics, Fernández reads and studies a lot and signs up for courses. On TikTok, she now recites poems and tells curious facts about The Snow Society or gives three clues for users to guess “which famous writer ended up exiled for having a Shakira session 52 and defaming his ex-wife in a book.” . The answer is Lope de Vega, whom she refers to as “the motopapi of the Golden Age” or the “Bad Bunny of the century of literature.” How do you come up with all these references? “In the morning I listen to Emilia’s latest song and I come home and read Vargas Llosa. Since I am constantly receiving those inputs, it comes naturally to me,” he explains.
Fernández studied journalism and audiovisual communication. For his final degree project, he set himself a challenge: to communicate classical culture and poetry on TikTok. After studying the platform a lot and based on trial and error, one day a video started working. It would be the first of many. “The difficult thing on TikTok is not to hit the big time and have a video go viral: it is to maintain yourself,” he explains.
She usually records the videos at home because she has good light: “Here I am surrounded by windows.” She started by resting her cell phone on books to record herself. She now uses a stabilizer and a microphone to get good sound. Then she edits her videos in Capcut, a “very simple and intuitive” application. She barely uses effects in the videos she records in her room because she considers that “the weight of the narration is the story itself.” On the other hand, if she does an interview or talks about movies, she usually adds subtitles, transitions, sound effects and images. She only uses music when she recites poetry, but not when she tells a story. sauce because he considers it distracting.
Among its most used hashtags are #culture, #booktop, #cinema or #aprendecontiktok. To measure the success of your TikToks, you look at views and engagement. He always tries to read the comments and, when he can, respond to them: “Many times they contribute. “If I upload a video of a queen, I see if they are interested in the topic or if someone tells me about another.” As the journalist states, that she has made tiktoks about Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I of England, in her profile “there is history and a lot of sauce.”
Ariane Hoyos (@arianehoyos)
Finding the keys to viralization is not easy. For Ariane Hoyos, 24, “getting to the point at the beginning of the video and creating an attractive hook is essential for people to stay and watch it.” The beginnings of his TikToks are captivating: Did you know that the Segovia aqueduct was built by the devil himself? Are there crocodiles in the sewers of New York? or what cup would you give each OT contestant if they came home for coffee?
Don’t just think about this hook. In fact, she scripts practically all of her content: “It is important to create powerful storytelling and go to the place where I am going to record sure of what I am going to do so as not to waste time.” Then she records many different shots with good lighting. He uses a spotlight and a microphone when he considers it necessary and makes sure that the image is careful and, above all, is natural. He also usually subtitles the videos. Between scripting, filming and editing, it takes about four or five hours to create a TikTok. “In addition to thinking about the idea, I almost always have to move around,” he says. In recordings made in Germany he explains, for example, the reason for the Berlin Wall or the history of the city based on his souvenirs.
In his most successful video, he shows what the wood stove in his town house is like: “People really value the naturalness with which I show something so everyday.” The main mistake that other users make is that “storytelling often fails, they do not use catchy phrases at the beginning of the video, they do not take care of the image or the sound and, above all, they do not make content that aligns with them, but rather they replicate ”. To measure the success of his TikToks, he looks at the statistics offered by the platform: “Comments are a great indicator of success, and I like to see the feedback from those who watch my videos.”
Hoyos premiered on TikTok in 2021. “I’m from a small town and I had always been embarrassed to upload content on digital platforms because of what they might say, but when I moved to Madrid and felt more ‘anonymous’, I encouraged myself,” she says. At first it grew very quickly on the platform: it reached 20,000 followers in just one month. Then the growth was more gradual until now reaching more than 400,000 followers. Today she makes money with the brands she works with on the platforms, but she continues to train as a social educator.