It has been about 3 years since Tiktok launched a physical meeting event in Singapore. I think that physical bonding is important to build the relationships that matter.
But we were NOT INVITED.
What went wrong? Actually I recall that this was not the only event we were not invited for. This event as a major trigger for us to review our social media strategy, which has been “wrong” for a while now.
We had not actively participated in the events and challenges by Tiktok for more than 8 months now. I believe we stopped in Oct 2021 until now.
In Oct 2021, we had an influx of clients who wanted to work with us, maybe because of the report that Tiktok now has more downloads and users than Facebook. We naturally/automatically focused our efforts on our clients. Then until now, we still continued to have inbound clients looking for us. No problem, we thought. If there was a problem, we should have seen it in the drop of interest from our clients, right?
NO. drop of interest does not happen immediately when you do something wrong. it takes time to show. in the case of social media it can be 1-2 years. The same way, doing the right thing also does not immediately provide benefits. it takes the same time, which is 1-2 years for it to really show. So that 8 months, we were basically benefiting from that first 2 years of hard work, and have not put in the investment for the future. This may not be obvious if you are new. We have been around social media for 7 years now and this is how the cycle repeats itself. The timing remains the same even though the other data shows that Tiktok is faster.
This is a GRAVE MISTAKE
Fortunately, we caught this situation in early July 2022. How we ended up sliding down this hole was surprisingly because of better business. I believe we are not the only one that went down this road. we allocated our resources to those things that were “making money”. and then away from those that were not revenue generating (like our own tiktok account). This is not the right thinking process. This is because the time frame for decision making is wrong. There is a delayed return of ROI on social media marketing. You need to see it across years to be able to see a notable clear difference.
If we continue down this road and ignore our Tiktok account, the end result will be a declining business. not because our videos were not right, but because we are not executing/manifesting the right behaviour for the ecosystem to push us to the top.
This is very difficult to explain to others who have not done it before. Because they are not used to seeing this process. While they can understand how the investment of education works, which is that you have to put in time and money for years to study, before you actually use anything when you graduate 4 years later, and then working enough to use that qualification to promote to a rank that was otherwise not possible without the education. This would be easily a 10 year timeline.
People are used to the quick money mentality – if i put in $100 today, what do i get tommorow? or maybe if im more patient, next month? they are unlikely to consider timelines that last years. I did not accept this too when Facebook, Instagram, Youtube passed me by. watching my peers succeed reminds me of what i want to invest in on a daily basis.
We forgot it ourselves. Not because we were not trying, but because there was no constant reminders on how important this is.
The performance of some of our videos went down, despite all the work and improvements to the content itself. As it turns out, contribution to Tiktok’s agenda, is a major factor in deciding how much traffic you get. Actually this is not surprising, we just hadn’t slipped out of this before. This is the way we treat others too. if they disappear for too long, the resources get reallocated to those still there.
good news – we are not completely out in the thrash. in fact we are still ahead of those who started during this 8 months, but we need to build momentum again.
our previous study of accounts who were created earlier shows that those accounts were generally ahead because they participated during a period of higher risk. this is like sweat equity. the first employee that does cleaning work ends up with more money than the 10,000th programmer. makes sense.
but the work that we did for 1.5 years, will have to be discounted, maybe down to a year (lost 30%). just like a relationship, if you don’t talk to someone for prolonged periods of time, the bond gets weaker and more has to be done to build to a great relationship.
There was something else we noticed. All along our intention was to use our own account to show our clients how it should be done. I felt that this was insufficient. Usually when you learn directly from one person, you are unlikely to do better than him. very likely you will be able to learn a portion, maybe 30-50%.
this means that we need to be doing at least 3-4x more than our client accounts.
In asian culture, it is quite common to expect the leader to move ahead, try and gain high competency first, before the rest would follow. this means we will have to do much more, maybe 10-20x what our clients would want to do.
We have recently taken in full time staff that is dedicated specially and only to our company account. This move should bring our company account back up to 4x of whatever it used to be. we used to be posting about 1-2x per week. this will be increased to once a day. any more than this frequency on tiktok is not rewarded well enough, or receives diminishing returns. we are better off putting that time invested somewhere else.
and then we have to do more, to explore what are the various channels that could work, like xiao hong shu, likee, youtube shorts, instagram reels, podcasts, linkedin etc. we tried to do this with the clients, but i think there is hesitation, because they would usually expect us to do it first and show some results. i should not try to convince them… its futile, and they are not ready for the high failure rates. we should do it on ourselves, and then the client realises, and wants us to do for them too. this is the “way of business” in asia.
Tiktok events are important to participate in. The main focus is to show Tiktok that we are invested and supportive of their efforts. In Asian culture, this is called “giving face”. and it’s exceptionally important, maybe more than the video quality.