Here’s how: Game the algorithm. 🎮

TikTok. Everybody’s heard about it by now one way or another, whether it was from the dancing videos, the cooking videos, or of course, the memes. The viral app has essentially replaced Vine, only this time it has significantly more features and is dominated by college and high school students—Zoomers. TikTok is not a neutral platform; it is unlikely you have heard about their algorithm, which controls most of what users see on the app. And unless you heavily use the app, you may not know the extent of the variety of content that dominates TikTok. We’ll take you inside how TikTok really works.

If you want to go viral, take a look at Tiktok’s algorithm and the ways to increase your chances of hitting millions of views. Tiktok’s goal is to keep their users on the app for as long as possible so they view as many ads as possible. The algorithm’s main function is to focus on showing the right videos to its target users, and it does this under what is termed video classification. Once a video is posted, it is classified under three factors: the content being shown, the audio file being linked, and the hashtags or text description describing the video. It then takes these classifications and sends the video to an audience pool that has liked or viewed similar content previously, called the For You Page. For example, the #1 TikToker, Charli D, made these dance videos using popular audio clips.