What I've Learned from Posting Twice a Day on TikTok for 2 Years
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For the past 2 years, I’ve posted twice a day on TikTok, once in the morning and once in the evening. It was a long and fascinating journey that helped me learn a lot about this unique, ever-evolving platform. Looking to enhance your own TikTok strategy? Here are 5 things I learned from posting on TikTok twice a day for 2 years.
1) You won’t run out of ideas, but you might run out of energy.
I began this experiment by accident. I started by posting on TikTok 3 times per day for 3 months in 2022 and wrote about the experience. After that, posting only twice a day seemed easy, so I kept going. In 2023, I tried posting 5 times per day for a week, which was far more challenging! Through those experiments, it became abundantly clear to me that I wasn’t going to run out of ideas anytime soon.
Working in social media has trained me to have a mindset of ‘everything is content.’ By watching a lot of content, creating it for clients, and starting to create more of it for myself, I was able to see the world through a content-oriented lens. That can be a blessing and a curse, but it worked to my advantage when trying to create videos twice a day for 2 years! A tasty lunch, a fun museum visit, a great book I was reading, or pretty flowers could be a video clip for TikTok.
By November 2023, or month 23 of this 2-year challenge, I was feeling tired. I had no shortage of ideas still, but lacked the energy or commitment to make them. I’d set reminders to film TikToks and ignore them repeatedly. I’m glad I ended this experiment when I did, because creating these videos was no longer as fun as it was at the outset.
2) There are easy, low maintenance ways to make video content.
The TikTok algorithm is always changing and new content types are constantly emerging. So good news: not every video you share needs to be you on camera, telling a story. When ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, launched CapCut, a video editing app, CapCut templates began taking TikTok by storm. CapCut templates are a fantastic way to create content when you’re just not in the mood to appear on camera. If you’re familiar with memes, CapCut templates are basically moving memes, taking brief clips from pop culture (think: scenes from The Office, interview clips of John Cena, viral videos of a cartoonish version of Toothless) and pairing them with music. They usually center around a particular theme or feeling, so it’s easy to jump in and share your own take on the trend. These were a lifesaver when I was struggling to get motivated to show up on camera.
Text-on-screen videos are another great option for tired TikTokkers. These work best when you use a clip of something aesthetic (flowers, rainfall, your feet walking through fall leaves, etc.), pair it with a trending audio, and add text with a deep but relatable thought. The clip should be about 5-7 seconds long, ensuring that viewers will watch the video a few times to read the entire. This type of video often performs well due to the relatable (and often vulnerable) sentiments shared and is easy to make, so it’s a win-win!
3) TikToks have a long lifespan.
This continues to surprise me almost every day! In December 2022, I wrote about what I learned from my most popular TikToks shared that year. Incredibly, my third most popular TikTok of all time is from 2022 but was not on that list! A short video I made with a voiceover describing the ‘Reese’s stuff your cup experience’ at Hershey’s Chocolate World currently has 82,000 views. I shared it in September 2022; it reached 10,000 views in February 2023. In one week alone in July 2023, it gained 10,000 views. By October of that year, it hit 60,000 views and 80,000 views by January 2024! Over 70,000 views in growth over a year later? That’s wild to me! You just don’t see that with platforms like Instagram. This shows that the content you create will continue to add value–both for the people discovering and enjoying it and for your own online presence–long after you initially created it. It’s well worth the time and effort!
I could share countless additional examples of this–even a short video I made commenting on problematic hosts of an obscure Japanese reality TV show has racked up almost 20,000 views nearly 2 years after I posted it! So: take heart. If your video isn’t particularly well received when you post it, leave it up. You never know if and when it might find its audience and start to take off.
4) You never know which videos will take off and which will flop.
On that note, it can be hard to predict which videos will be popular and which will flop. Sometimes you have an inkling–when there’s one topic that everyone is talking about in the cultural conversation and you have something smart or funny to add, there’s a pretty good chance it might take off! My most popular video of all time remains a video of me discussing red flags in Ned Fulmer’s cookbook after his cheating scandal that got him fired from the Try Guys. I knew people would likely eat it up and that it would gain lots of comments; that kind of engagement is key to the algorithm serving your video to more and more people. It’s also worth noting that because this video was time sensitive and relevant to the cultural conversation only for a short period of time, it hasn’t had the continual growth that other, more evergreen videos I’ve made have seen.
Many other videos that I’ve put lots of time and effort into reached disappointingly few people. Sometimes they gain more traction later, sometimes they don’t. You can always keep trying to tweak and optimize your videos and approach, but sometimes you just have to accept that we have no control over this platform, and anyone seeing your content and enjoying it is still a win and a valuable point of connection. That’s worth celebrating!
5) Creating video content is a lot of work! Even if you’re efficient and strategic in your approach, you might still burn out.
It’s true: even if you plan your videos in advance, film them in batches, make lighter lift videos like CapCut templates and text-on-screen ones… you can still burn out. You can have all the ideas in the world, and none of the energy to execute on them. We all go through seasons of life where we feel like sharing and connecting and creating more, and ones where we feel like withdrawing and hibernating a bit. It’s okay to be exhausted from making content. It’s okay to take a break. We don’t have to give so much of ourselves to the algorithm so relentlessly. Lately, my approach to TikTok has been to share what I genuinely want to share, and then the rest of the time…just step back, watch, and enjoy.
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