Using TikTok to reach a new developer audience

Zachary Powell: Hello, everyone. Welcome to basically using TikTok to reach new developer audience. Today, we're gonna take a very brief look at what TikTok is and why you should be using it as part of your DevRel content creation, at least as far as I'm concerned. So quick, who am I? Basically, I was an Android developer for about ten years.

As the same story for a lot of people, I fell into DevRel completely by chance, worked with a recruiter looking for a new job, and suddenly I was in DevRel. And working as a developer advocate for Huawei, after a couple of months, I then moved into basically the lead developer advocate position for Huawei's AppGallery Connect, which is basically all their developer services relating to their Android app store, which is AppGallery. My kind of goal with my DevRel structure is to definitely take a content first approach, and one of those things has been looking at different social media platforms and where they can be useful for building communities and generally getting a DevRel message out to the people. So what is TikTok? Well, unless you've been living under a rock, you probably have some idea of what TikTok is.

It's, you know, it's a social network. But what actually is TikTok? It's a a video focused social network. It allows you to create short videos directly from within their app, and these videos can be basically three different lengths. So you can either have up to fifteen seconds, up to sixty seconds, or up to three minutes.

What makes TikTok particularly interesting from a content creation point of view is that, basically, you view content through what they call the for you page or the FYP, and you're only presented with one video at a time. You swipe up on the screen to see the next video, and you continue consuming content on and on and on in kind of an infinite scroll. What this means is when a user is actually viewing your video, they are only viewing your video. There's nothing else on the screen at the same time unlike more traditional social media kind of sites, Twitter, Facebook, etcetera, where you might have a long feed of things all on the screen at one time, all fighting for your attention. The other screen that people can actually view content on is basically, the following tab, which is essentially the same as the FYP, but the difference being it only shows content from people that you are actually following.

The algorithms that are used basically decide what content you get to see via the f y FYP page. As we've said as as you probably know, TikTok does appeal to a a younger audience. About 40% of users are between the ages of 16 and 24. So, this is kind of a question I get asked a lot when I bring up TikTok, because people say, developers on TikTok? Surely not.

That's weird. What what are you talking about? Well, it isn't just silly dances, skits, and that kind of content anymore. That's very much still a big part of the content, but that isn't the only thing that's going on. We have a growing we've seen a growing number of developers and a growing developer community on the platform.

But where have they come from? Why why has that happened? Well, as I said, TikTok is massive with the younger audience. But that audience is aging. That audience is growing up.

That audience is moving to college, moving to university, and they're starting to think about their career path. They're starting to decide, well, what am I gonna do for my life? And, of course, understandably, many of those people are turning turning to software development. It's a very lucrative career. It's a very big up thing at the moment.

Why not? But what happens when you're stuck on something? What happens if you need some help with something or you need to learn something? Well, people turn to the social media that they know. And what does this group of people know?

What does this group of people use primarily? Well, that would be TikTok. So we're seeing this massive boom of people who are moving into developer careers, developer career paths, and turning to TikTok to learn and find out more information about being a developer. If you take a look at couple of the hashtags, the developer hashtag has about 384,000,000 views, and the software engineering hashtag has about 552,000,000 views. We've also got a couple of example accounts on screen, and they've got some really very impressive follower numbers as well.

This is not a small community anymore. People are very interested in developer related things, and this is what the time to move into DevRel on TikTok. So how do you TikTok? How do you actually create a video? Well, the process of actually creating a TikTok video is very easy.

There's a central button on the screen that you click on the bottom navigation bar. You start recording your video. You can edit it in app, and you can kind of set up everything that you might want, any overlays, all that sort of fun stuff. And then you can publish it all within the app. So we won't go into any more details about the actual mechanics of creating a video right now.

It's very straightforward. However, one thing I will mention is they have finally allowed you to start uploading videos via their website as well. So for team accounts or if you are, you know, more used to traditional video production, you can now actually push your content to TikTok via a web interface as opposed to having to use the app, which could be quite fiddly for those sorts of situations. So what we wanna talk about today is the is how do we actually make a good TikTok video? As I mentioned, it's the algorithm that decides what you're gonna actually see.

And how that works is TikTok kinda tracks what content you as a a user are consuming, what things you're liking, what things you're commenting on, what videos you're watching all the way through. And and then it compiles a profile based on all that information about you and about what you would enjoy. So it then uses that profile to kind of match videos that it thinks links to that and present those to that user. When you create a video, how it actually starts out is TikTok will send that content to a very small group of people, about 10 people, and those people that TikTok thinks will like your content, will thinks it will like that video. If they do, like it by either literally watching, liking the video, watching the whole video all the way through, or commenting on the video, generally interacting in some way.

TikTok will kind of build up an idea of, actually, yes, I know what this video is about, so I know who to show it to. And it will slowly increase the number of people that see your video in kind of waves. You can actually kinda watch it happen, increasing the size of the group bigger and bigger and bigger until it gets to a point where people kinda stop watching it and are no longer interested in it. At which point TikTok decides, well, yeah, your your video, for whatever reason, is no longer interesting or no longer irrelevant, and it kinda gets pushed to the side. So it's very important to craft a video that has the right details associated to it so that TikTok knows what the content is all about.

We can do this by basically making sure that all the metadata and stuff is correct. Firstly, we make sure that the video is using hashtags. So you can add hashtags to the description of your video, and these are useful for two things. A, TikTok will use them when it's kind of profiling the video and understand what the video is about. Hashtags are also searchable.

So if people are specifically looking for specific content, it's a very easy way to highlight your content. Generic hashtags like the developer hashtag or the software engineering hashtag like we mentioned are useful to kind of give you the the broad idea of what the video is about. But make sure you're also using more specific tags. If your video is about a specific programming language or a tool that you're using or something something more specific, make sure that you include those with as a hashtag as well. You can also make use of basically overlaying audio from another video into your own video.

So if there's particularly popular audio, you can use that to create your own video. And that kind of happens quite a lot with the sort of funny videos, the memey videos that happen. And that's another great way to expose your video to more people because when the audio is trending, TikTok is gonna show that video is using that audio, more often to more people. But without a doubt, the most important thing that you can do for your video is make sure that it has an incredibly catchy hook. When your when your video is presented to someone, like I mentioned, they're that's the only video they're seeing, but they're probably only gonna pay attention for a couple of seconds at most before they swipe to the next video.

So within those first few seconds of your video, you have to make sure that you're grabbing hold of their attention. You're creating a hook, whether that's quick you know, explaining what you're gonna do or kind of giving them something, some sort of teaser that makes them want to watch more of the video. Something like, for example, my five unpopular views on Android development. It's cheesy, but it does work. It gets people going, oh, hang on a minute.

What's unpopular about his opinion? Let's have a look. So as a quick example, I have over about 1,500 followers. But if I create a video with no tags, no description, the video is slow to start, there's no hook, I'm never gonna get probably more than 50 views on that video, which is not gonna happen. However, if I correctly tag the video, add a short description, make sure there's a strong hook on the video, I can guarantee almost certainly that I'm gonna get about a 100 to 300 views without a problem.

If the particular the video is particularly interesting or particularly well crafted, entertaining, or whatever else, it will easily get over a thousand views and start to become sort of pick up traction. So we we know how to make TikTok videos, but what kind of things do we want to make the videos about? We can kinda put this into three content buckets. The first of the three would be the funny entertaining videos. These are normally videos that are quite short and kind of some sort of meme or joke or something silly, and, that's always quite fun to make.

We've also got the q and a type video. So another thing that's quite interesting about TikTok is if someone comments on your video, you can reply to that comment with a video. So that allows you to answer people's questions in a video form. And that's a really great way to engage with people and then build up a community because people like it when their questions are actually being answered and they can understand the answers. And video kind of does that in a better way than maybe text alone could do.

And then finally, the other kind of content bucket would be the informative bucket. So that's basically your kind of information about maybe the the your your product that you're advocating for or your company, or maybe you want to do a series teaching how to do certain things in a programming language, whatever it might be, those tend to be a bit longer, and that's kind of where the hook kinda definitely comes in more handy to make sure that people understand what your video is about quickly and get interested. So we've got these three content buckets, but what how much content do we actually need to be producing? That's kind of a difficult one to answer, but it's very important. And the key to remember is TikTok favors consistency.

Make sure that your upload schedule is incredibly consistent because the second you stop uploading, your views will just drop off drop off to almost nothing within a day or two. The kind of golden ratio is definitely to try and do three videos a day. And for me personally, I aim to do one of each of these content buckets per day. But, of course, that can change. Some days, I might have lots of questions to answer, so I'll do three q and a.

Some days, I might have no questions, so I'll do a couple of funny ones and an informative one. Or anything, you know, it can it can it can change. And also importantly, you can schedule posts. So if you suddenly have lots of questions, you can spread them out throughout the week, and you haven't got to worry about posting them later. So I did want to have a couple of examples, but I think we're kind of moving through.

But these are sort of a couple of examples of the different types of posts. So first, we have a kind of a meme, a funny a funny post, and it's basically just a joke that goes over the tongue. So that's the kind of that's kind of a memey one. And then you can see the second video. Oh, you didn't hear it?

Oh, no. That's a shame. Let's quickly do that. I've I've realized I it

Speaker 2: was okay. Mama said that it was quite alright. Actually, she specifically said not to do this, but LOL, what can you do?

Zachary Powell: There we go. So that's kind of a just a short joke video. And the other two so the middle one is kind of an example of where you're answering a comment so you can see that the question is overlaid. And finally, the third one is just a quick part of my acronym of the day series, basically. So, basically, one of the things that's really great about TikTok is that you can reuse your content.

That video that you're already creating for YouTube can be broken down into short segments and uploaded as a series on TikTok, or perhaps you can upload a quick kind of almost advertisement to just quickly post out, hey. This is what we're talking about, and, go over to YouTube to watch the full video. So there's a lot of recontent recyclability, there that you can really get into, and it's really great. Sorry. That was a little bit of a whistle stop whistle stops tour.

Certainly, if you're interested in sort of learning more and getting to know about what I'm doing, please do check out my Polywork profile. It includes all my social media links, including my TikTok. And I'm always happy to chat to people who are interested in learning more about TikTok and how it can be used for Deborah.