The Hooks of Viral TikTok Movies [2021 Study]

For many people, whereas Fb, Instagram, and Twitter are seemingly all downloaded on our telephones, TikTok is entrance and heart on the homepage. The video-sharing platform has taken the world by storm, and customers merely can’t get sufficient of this content material on social media.

The app’s lightning-quick rise to fame has us asking the query: What’s so particular about it? To search out out, we analyzed tons of of common TikTok movies by watching the primary three seconds of every and recording tons of details about their “hooks.” Utilizing this information, together with specifics about content material captioning and engagement numbers, we would have the beginnings of a solution to this query. 

Key Findings

• Happiness was the most typical emotion triggered by viral TikTok movies: 58% had been made in a approach that impressed happiness over different feelings.
• Greater than 1 in 3 viral TikTok movies centered on an individual talking inside the first three seconds.
• Some genres of TikTok movies had been more likely than others to return from verified accounts, particularly life hacks, recommendation, and wellness together with health and sports activities.
• In style dance movies obtained extra performs, on common, than movies in any of the opposite prime 5 genres. Nonetheless, they had been additionally among the many least shared and commented on.
• Greater than half of viral TikTok movies used music as their major backing sound within the first three seconds.

It’s a Comfortable Place 

TikTok is a private and emotional place — let’s see what sort of emotions viral movies evoke in individuals.

Of the viral TikTok movies we analyzed, a major chunk centered on an individual talking on to the digital camera. Many content material creators attempt to broaden their horizons and develop extra private relationships with their viewers, which could clarify why so many clips revolve round a face-to-face interplay

Listed here are another fascinating findings that relate to this space of investigation:

• Sixty p.c of viral movies featured one individual seen on display screen. Solely about 17% had no people seen, and fewer than 10% featured greater than two.
• One in 4 viral movies featured a minimum of one animal.
• Canines had been extra common than cats: 46% of viral animal movies confirmed canines, whereas solely 28% featured cats.

There’s a purpose why the app has just lately hit one billion month-to-month customers, and it may need one thing to do with the truth that happiness, humor, and shock had been by far the most typical feelings sparked by the movies we analyzed. This type of pleasant content material is a key a part of the technological technique that makes TikTok so addictive: we see one thing pleasant, it triggers a dopamine response. 

E for Everybody

In style social media platforms have the flexibility to shortly skyrocket somebody to stardom. Many occasions, individuals are caught unexpectedly when this occurs. On TikTok, 83% of viral movies we analyzed got here from non-verified accounts. Gaining notoriety, publicity, and fame can clearly occur to anybody, making the app the place to be for each informal customers in addition to aspiring influencers.

Some genres of movies are extra seemingly than others to stem from verified accounts. 38% of viral movies within the life hacks, recommendation, and wellness and health and sports activities classes stemmed from verified customers. For instance, Demi Bagby, a CrossFit athlete and one of many prime feminine TikTok influencers, had effectively over 14 million followers and 285 million likes on her web page on the time of writing. Somebody with that enormous a following is certain to supply a wholesome quantity of viral content material. These high-profile accounts additionally see boosts to engagement, benefiting from larger median likes, views, feedback, and shares.

Totally different Strokes for Totally different People

Individuals’s feeds are curated primarily based on their video preferences. What sort of viral movies do individuals watch, like, share, and touch upon essentially the most?

• Viral dance movies had nearly 3 million extra median performs than the following hottest style, the outside (which was additionally essentially the most shared style). Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, who each began their TikTok careers with an emphasis on dance movies, are presently the first and third-most adopted influencers on the app, respectively. 
• Concerning median likes, individuals additionally extremely authorized of dance movies, as they tied with pet movies with 1.1 million every. 
• Individuals additionally couldn’t assist themselves from commenting on cute animals, as these TikTok movies had a median of 9,900 feedback — the very best of any style.

The Sound of Music

There are quite a lot of catchy tunes obtainable for our listening pleasure lately, and lots of have been popularized on TikTok. Which genres reign supreme on the app?

Whereas face-to-face interactions are commonplace in TikTok movies, a dialog isn’t essentially a part of the equation — 56% of viral movies had music as their major sound. By a big margin, pop songs had been heard essentially the most usually, adopted by hip-hop and rap. Seeing as viral dancing movies had essentially the most performs in comparison with other forms of viral movies, it is unsurprising that these music genres had been commonest. 

Movies that featured largely music as their sound carried out higher, on common, throughout all engagement metrics than ones the place music was not the focus of the audio. Solely 37% of movies featured really unique sound that was created particularly for them, whereas the remaining used music or pre-created audio from some other place. Curiously, movies with unique sounds carried out worse throughout all engagement metrics.

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To fast-track their approach towards web virality, some customers tried utilizing key phrases of their captions and hashtags like “FYP” (which refers to a person’s curated feed, in any other case generally known as a ‘For You’ web page), “trending,” and “viral.” Round 38% of the TikToks that had been analyzed on this examine included these key phrases.

Nonetheless, in comparison with different movies with different key phrases, ones particularly utilizing variations on “FYP,” “trending,” and “viral” underperformed on all engagement metrics (aside from shares). Figuring out your viewers and utilizing particular, focused key phrases might be a greater technique than throwing round broad, unfocused terminology. 

Lastly, amongst these common TikTok movies, caption sentiment (as calculated by a pure language processing algorithm) was constructive greater than twice as usually because it was damaging. Amongst movies with calculable sentiment, 68% had been constructive, and 32% had been damaging.

What Does It All Imply?

Our evaluation of viral TikTok movies has indicated that doing the next whereas creating content material on the platform might improve your probabilities of publishing common movies:

• Repeatedly embody content material that speaks on to your viewers, participating them in a dialog.
• Create movies that may make viewers really feel completely satisfied and can set off constructive feelings.
• When you’re not a verified creator on TikTok, strive creating content material immediately associated to your area of interest hobbies and pursuits, comparable to cooking, dance, pets, or trend.

When you’re curious about discovering and analyzing the sorts of content material individuals love to have interaction with, you’ve come to the proper place. Examine Semrush’s options on Content material Advertising and marketing and Social Media for extra research, insights, and data.

Methodology and Limitations

First, we used an unofficial TikTok API to retrieve 500 movies from TikTok’s trending feed. The complete pattern of movies was collected at one time. These movies had been retrieved with out logging right into a TikTok account and from an IP tackle within the western United States. To one of the best of our data, this allowed us to bypass personalization algorithms that would skew our pattern. 

Then, we used a handful of textual content and audio processing libraries: 

• We made use of the ftfy textual content encoding fixer by Robyn Speer to restore encoding errors as a result of processing a number of completely different textual content encodings. 
• To extract key phrases from caption textual content, we used the YAKE! key phrase extractor. 
• We used NLTK’s VADER sentiment analyzer to seize sentiment scores for video captions. 
• To acknowledge and classify musical materials within the sounds of those movies, we used the AI-powered audio recognition service provided by AudD, LLC. 
• Style info for acknowledged songs got here from the API-accessible metadata for his or her related artists as described by Spotify.

After extracting the movies and their metadata, we clipped every video to its first three seconds. Then, a researcher reviewed a pattern of 300 clips — the primary 300 of our complete pattern — and recorded information on 19 traits for every video. The fields we ended up utilizing on this evaluation had been:

• Variety of individuals seen on display screen
• Whether or not somebody was talking
• Who or what they had been chatting with
• Whether or not animals had been current on display screen
• Varieties of animals current, if relevant
• Whether or not the sound within the video was unique
• Whether or not the sound within the video was largely music or largely not music
• Most probably meant emotional impression
• Video style(s)

Elements used within the evaluation, which we obtained from metadata immediately from TikTok:

• Performs
• Likes
• Shares
• Feedback
• Captions
• Hashtags
• Whether or not the video got here from a verified account

The pattern sizes for the highest 5 video genres as seen within the chart titled “Influence of Style on Engagement Metrics” are as follows:

1. Humor: 110 movies, 37% of pattern
2. Dance: 66 movies, 22% of pattern
3. Pets: 64 movies, 21% of pattern
4. Trend: 30 movies, 10% of pattern
5. Outdoor: 27 movies, 9% of pattern

This isn’t a consultant examine of profitable TikTok content material. One of many limitations of this examine is the usage of subjective classification of style and the meant emotional impression of movies, which can be impacted by the researcher’s distinctive background. Songs not acknowledged by the popularity algorithm or that aren’t current within the Spotify database might have been excluded from evaluation. 

In-depth evaluation of user-created content material on social media websites is proscribed at first by the ephemeral nature of social media tendencies. We sought to research variables that will stay comparatively constant over time, however readers must be conscious that tendencies might change at a fast tempo.