 TikTok is spying on you and in this video here, I'm gonna show you how to take advantage of it so you can blow your profile up. All right, so the first thing that you have to understand is TikTok thinks completely differently than any social media platform you've experienced prior. So many of these social media platforms are all about who are you around, who are your friends and trying to connect you to other friends, through friends. That's how they were built algorithmically from the beginning, right? TikTok is like knob up all of that because some people, they wouldn't even be friends with their friends if they weren't in the same vicinity. They wouldn't even be family with some of their same family members, right? If they could choose to. So how do I wanna pair people not by who they happen to already be connected to but their own natural interest? It's matchmaking. TikTok is that friend that's trying to say, oh gosh, she likes dogs and she's vegan and she hates cigarettes and cigarette smokers. Let me introduce her to Johnny because Johnny loves dogs. He actually has two of them and he just went vegan and he doesn't smoke. Let's pair these people to each other. That's the way TikTok is thinking. And what does that look like from an algorithm standpoint and how they're spying on you? I'll get into how you take advantage of it, the steps, but think of it this way. TikTok is reading your profile as a whole, right? You might be Susie and then looking for all the Johnny's on the platform to show your content, right? To the Johnny's. And of course, how are you represented? You are represented by your content. That's how TikTok learns about you, right? Cause they don't know who you are truly, but your content is giving them a sense of who you are. And you can make yourself whoever you want yourself to be. You have to put out content that speaks to TikTok and lets them know who you want to be shown to. So how does TikTok spy on you and find out who you are and what your content's about? One word, keywords. That's the primary way that all this is going down. And if you think about keywords, you're familiar with them because so many people use Google, right? And what happens on Google? If you're looking for restaurants in Atlanta, you type that in and what's gonna pop up? Restaurants in Atlanta. But how do they know to show you these restaurants in Atlanta? Google's not magic. What's happening is there's restaurants, right? That are looking for a business and they will put themselves on a website, right? And provide keywords on their website and other metadata that lets people know that they're in Atlanta and they're a restaurant. So when that keyword search happens, bam, they pop up, right? They have to put them in position to be found when someone types restaurants in Atlanta. And Google, got that? With keywords on TikTok, it looks like four different places. First, you have hashtags and second, you have captions. See, a lot of people think that you have to hashtag just to tell TikTok what your video's about, right? Oh, it's about dogs, so I gotta put dogs in the hashtag. It's about music, so I have to put music in the hashtag. That's not true at all, right? They're actually reading your caption in general and taking all those words into account to signify what this video is about. That's why it's a waste of time to use irrelevant hashtags, but we can get to that in the moment. Now there's proof that TikTok is reading the text as a whole, not just taking in hashtags solely. For instance, if you type in dogs in the search bar, I'm just staying with dogs for the sake of consistency, you'll see plenty of posts pop up with hashtag dogs, but eventually you'll also see some posts that actually do not have dogs in the hashtag directly. It might have dog as a part of it. For example, just typing that in, I found this post and it doesn't actually say hashtag dogs anywhere. It does include the word dogs in hashtag funny dogs of TikTok, but if TikTok wasn't reading the text as a whole, as opposed to just putting hashtags that are exactly the same in the same place, they wouldn't know to put this same video that's relevant to anyone who's looking under dogs. But I can simplify that even more. When you're on TikTok, you go in the search bar, you don't have to type in hashtag dogs, you just have to type in dogs because the hashtag is relevant, but it's not the end all be all. Now let's talk about the third way that TikTok is researching your content for keywords, the text in your video, right? You type that text on the screen. TikTok knows what you're saying, right? They know when you're sleeping and know when you're awake. You know that story and the fourth way is actually related to that because TikTok is also transcribing the audio in your videos and looking for those keywords as well. Think about it. There's a voice to text feature on TikTok where you can literally have all the words that you're saying pop up on the screen and it'll be pretty accurate without you actually having to type it out. Well, TikTok is doing that whether you ask for the words to pop up on the screen or not. You're just choosing whether you want it to be seen but the TikTok is taking that text and analyzing it regardless. So if those four primary ways that TikTok is analyzing all the keywords in your video in mind, here's how to take advantage of it. Number one, don't use irrelevant texts, especially irrelevant hashtags. Most people think, hey, I'm just gonna try to use a trending hashtag so I can blow my stuff up because that's the type of stuff that people use to do on Instagram. What do I say all the time? Don't bring your Instagram mentality over to TikTok, it's gonna mess you up. Remember, TikTok is a matchmaking platform and if you lie and say you don't smoke cigarettes and yes, you're vegan but the reality is you're a heavy meat eater and you smoke five times a day when you get matched on that date it's probably not gonna go well. You might even be able to lie a little bit but we know how that goes. And secondly, leverage all four places that TikTok is looking for keywords and try to make it as parallel as possible. You don't wanna kill your content by forcing it but when it's possible, you can have dogs in your hashtag, dogs in your caption or some version of dogs. You can have dogs in your actual on text video and you can show a dog and maybe even mention dogs in the audio. That's extremely parallel but again, you don't wanna force it and don't wanna kill your content. Just know that when possible, use as many of them as possible for whatever the primary keywords or niches that make sense for your video. And then third, be consistent with this as a whole because remember, TikTok is trying to figure out who you are, one piece of content that's completely aligned where you mentioned dog in all four primary places for your keywords doesn't really add up great with another post that everything is about, I don't know, sharks. And then another post is about rock bands and then another post is all about whatever random thing because TikTok is now confused and even if the content specifically is done great, it's amazing to format things off the chain, the keywords are placed right, it doesn't know where to place you because your profile as a whole reads weird. And now let's end this video with some hashtag that makes using all of this information easy going forward. Number one, use four niche specific hashtags. Now, y'all know, if y'all know me in general, I'm a huge proponent of using four hashtags. TikTok likes you to use about four hashtags, not going in all the reasoning here, but you wanna use four niche specific hashtags. Why? Because you're really telling TikTok, this is who I am, this is who I wanna be shown to. Secondly, you wanna use four broad hashtags. Now, there's a back and forth that goes between these spaces. I'm not gonna go into all the details here, but you don't wanna get too, too, too hyper focused on TikTok sometimes because TikTok's algorithm is so sensitive it can become too specific on who it's showing you to sometimes and eliminate all of the potential reach on the platform. So you want to ebb and flow at times going back and forth between specificity and using broad hashtags. Now, when you use broad hashtags, don't use irrelevant broad hashtags. Like, this is one of the times that hashtag FYP actually comes into play, right? It's broad, but it doesn't really have to do anything really in particular. So you're not necessarily hurting yourself in terms of your relevance within the algorithm, right? An example is saying, I make rock music and then also just hashtag music because there's so much type of music in general, right? Or a songwriter, I'm a songwriter and then the music is more broad. Then you can go even more broad using the term like pop or songs. Thirdly, mix it up. You can use two niche hashtags and two broad hashtags or you can use three niche hashtags and one broad hashtags, but mix that puppy up. This hybrid hashtag strategy allows you to play both sides. And last but not least, you can use no hashtags at all. I know, that sounds risky. I am not gonna use hashtags. How am I gonna get my video seen? Well, that's a great way to see that you don't need hashtags to get seen on TikTok. TikTok's always gonna try to show your content to somebody. It's just that hashtags help inform who it should show it to. But you can do no hashtags at all and still have your keywords and everything else completely aligned in your caption. You can be aligned in the content in the video, the audio and what do you know? It'll show it to the right person. But so give that a try because if anything, it'll at least burst that bubble and take some of the pressure you may feel to use hashtags all the time. Now, with all that stuff in mind, remember that TikTok is just that friend that wants to hook you up with someone who's gonna show you the love that you deserve. But if you don't know who you are yet or you're lying about who you are, how is that friend gonna do a good job at showing you to someone who's going to love you for you? And by the way, if you're interested in more content on how to take advantage of TikTok, especially for music artists, we have an entire playlist of videos breaking down how the platform actually works and how you can make it work for you. Check out this clip I'll add above and check out the playlist. See you in the next video.