Five Things I Learned From Posting On TikTok (And Why I Continue to Post)
In May 2020, knee deep in our COVID-19 lockdown, my daughter’s friends had a contest to see whose family could make the best TikTok video. We invested about two hours making a video — our family cast as superheroes with a COVID-19 villain — acting out a bunch of ridiculous shenanigans. We won the “contest,” hands down. I created my own TikTok account to post that video, which garnered about 100 views. I have since learned that 100 views is an abysmal reach in the world of TikTok; it’s about the minimum number of views a new post ever receives.
Around that same time, I started this blog to share thoughts on leadership, investing, business building, and personal growth. As I continued regularly posting blog entries over the next two years, I would ask my kids what they thought of my blog, only to receive blank stares and forced smiles. They rarely read it. While they didn’t take the time to read my writing, I knew they were voraciously consuming 60-second TikTok videos — so I decided to try to repurpose the messages from my blog posts into 60-second videos and post them on TikTok.
The first dozen videos gained a little more interest than my initial COVID-19 video. But when I posted a video of a phone call telling my friend we were selling an investment we’d held for 20 years, everything changed. Over the course of two weeks, the video was viewed over one million times, and much to my surprise, 12,000 people started following my TikTok account.
Having somehow gathered an audience that would equate to selling out Radio City Music hall for two nights, I realized I had an exciting opportunity to reach a lot more people than my blog ever had. I was honored to have their attention, so I continued posting regularly. Mostly I would look straight at the camera and deliver a simple message, such as, “Here is what I learned from several thousand hours of self-help content,” “Here are the four biggest mistakes I see Stanford students make,” or “Here is why I don’t think you should invest in crypto.”
“I realized I had an exciting opportunity to reach a lot more people than my blog ever had.”
My account continued to grow, and I steadily gained followers over the next several months while posting about three or four times a week. As of this writing, over 635,000 accounts are following along, and people have viewed my various videos 66 million times. After decades of building my career as an investor, I never thought I’d be adding “TikToker” to my resume, but here we are. I’ve learned a lot through this experience, so I thought I’d share those learnings with you here (and I guess I will need to post a TikTok video about it so my kids will see these learnings as well).
“After decades of building my career as an investor, I never thought I’d be adding “TikToker” to my resume, but here we are. ”
Here are the top 5 things I have learned about posting on TikTok
1. TikTok is a powerful platform
I often post the same video on Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. It is not uncommon to receive several hundred views on Instagram, several thousand views on LinkedIn, and one hundred thousand or more views on TikTok. There are about one billion monthly active users worldwide on TikTok who watch an average of 6.06 hours of content per week; it is an extraordinarily powerful platform that can dramatically catapult the reach of your content, even if you don’t start with lots of followers. It is a great place to gain exposure and build an audience.
2. “Writing a short letter” is a valuable skill
Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” In a typical TikTok video, you have between one and two seconds to capture the viewer’s attention, and most videos are less than 60 seconds long. This forces you to convey the essence of the message in the first sentence, and the entire message in a condensed fashion. It takes time to learn how to boil down your thoughts, but it is a powerful skill — not only for TikTok but for life in general. As attention spans shrink, being succinct will become an increasingly critical communication skill. (I’m not saying shrinking attention spans are a good thing, but if you can’t beat ‘em, at least be able to communicate with ‘em.)
“It takes time to learn how to boil down your thoughts, but it is a powerful skill — not only for TikTok but for life in general.”
3. Know your audience
I consider each TikTok post a mini-speech — like a condensed version of the lectures I give for my MBA students — and the first rule of public speaking is to know your audience. I generate relevant topics from Q&A sessions with followers on TikTok Live, issues I’m working to solve in my own life, topics my students ask me about, or current events. I make posts that I believe can help people with a specific issue they may be facing (overcoming fear, changing their career, ending a negative relationship), help them learn something new (investing in a recession, setting goals, creating habits), or remind them of something they already know they should be doing (thinking long-term, writing out their goals). While I cherish the impact I get to have on my MBA students, this platform allows me to bring some of those powerful lessons to an audience who may not have the opportunity to partake in a similar classroom setting but are no less eager to learn. This is the audience I love to reach!
4. Quality means more than quantity
Scores of social media experts encourage users to post on TikTok all the time. They say, “The algorithm likes when you post a lot,” “You never know which post will do well, so post a lot,” and “You need to be consistent.” While all of these messages are valid to some extent, I believe quality is much more important than quantity. It is much easier to make a single video that gets one million views than to produce 20 videos that each get 50,000 views. The algorithm is highly asymmetric. If you have a high-quality video that generates 10% more watch time than another video, you won’t get 10% more engagement; you may get 4x or 10x more. And on a personal level, I am not posting just to post — the quality of the content matters a lot to me (regardless of how the algorithm treats it).
5. You need to have thick skin
TikTok users are generally positive and well-meaning in their comments, but it seems like a subset of people are inevitably negative, no matter how seemingly innocuous my statements are. I’ve received comments such as, “This boomer has no idea what he’s talking about,” and “Stanford should be ashamed to have this man teaching at their school,” as well as personal comments about my background and physical appearance. These comments still hurt, but I have learned to take them in stride and realize you need to take the good with the bad. On my best days, I learn from the negative comments — things people like and don’t like about the messages or my presentation style. I try to understand the “why” behind them (is it a “me” thing or a “them” thing?) and adjust (or not) accordingly from there. But reading the comments is not for the faint of heart!
To have the greatest impact, meet them where they are
When I was a teenager searching for my identity, I listened to hundreds of hours of audiobooks by authors like Brian Tracy and Tony Robbins . As a result, I learned to take time to decide what I really wanted in life, to think big, overcome my fears, write out my goals, and create the discipline of working toward them daily. I say this without a hint of hyperbole — their content changed my life. The current generation of teenagers may not listen to audiobooks for hours on end, but they do consume TikTok videos in 60-second increments (often for hours on end). Ultimately, I hope to impact some subset of my viewers like the audio cassette authors helped me as an impressionable teenager. Learning to meet my audience where they are has been a battle, but it is one I think is worth fighting.
“Ultimately, I hope to impact some subset of my viewers like the audio cassette authors helped me as an impressionable teenager.”