A couple weekends ago, I discovered a trick to getting tops on Shein for 14 cents, so I made a Tiktok mentioning it. I figured it would do well and get a couple thousand views and have some people asking why, but it went completely viral and ended up with almost a million views. Here's a couple things I learned in the process!
People get MAD. I had so many rude comments, from people telling me to post the tutorial to people telling me I should be cancelled because I support fast fashion. (Yes, I'm aware fast fashion is bad, but I do get about 50% of my clothes secondhand + I don't have the money to shop at sustainable brands and it's hard to go thrifting right now because of Covid.) It kind of blows my mind that people would be so rude and demanding. A lot of people were mad because I didn't post the sequel right away and they started assuming I was just saying this for views, but in reality I just wanted to wait until Sunday when Shein had free shipping so I could actually show that each item was 14 cents.
Views come in waves, much like this pandemic. I got around 100 views within the first few hours of posting it, then a couple thousand within 24 hours. After about 5 days, I had hit 25k views and I thought that was as far as it would go, but then on Saturday, it started blowing up and I hit 100k views. I thought it would stop there, but by the end of the night I had 500,000 views and 5,000 followers (I had 120 followers before this). I currently have 6,000 followers and 600,000 views.
There is no possible way to respond to every comment. I've never had a piece of content go viral before, so I honestly didn't understand that it would take hours and hours to respond to every comment. I've always wondered why people with viral videos don't respond to most comments, but now I know--it's simply a waste of time.
It's kind of addicting to just sit there and watch the numbers go up. I was in the car for the majority of the day that day, because I was on a road trip to Colorado, and I literally just sat there for hours watching the numbers rise. Definitely not the most productive use of your time, but it's so addicting!
Your next video won't do as well. My next video was the actual tutorial on how to get the shirts for 14 cents, and it got around 100k views, which is still pretty good, but nothing compared to the previous video. I was pretty surprised since my engagement was so high on that second video--it has more shares and a higher like-to-view ratio than the first video so I really thought the algorithm would favor it.
People will reach out elsewhere. My Instagram DM's were flooded with people asking me to drop the tutorial, and a couple people even commented on my YouTube videos as well. However, my Instagram follower count and YouTube subscriber count didn't really increase.
Overall, it was an interesting experience! If you've found me from TikTok, hi! hello! Hope you stick around :)
Your next video won't do as well. My next video was the actual tutorial on how to get the shirts for 14 cents, and it got around 100k views, which is still pretty good, but nothing compared to the previous video. I was pretty surprised since my engagement was so high on that second video--it has more shares and a higher like-to-view ratio than the first video so I really thought the algorithm would favor it.
People will reach out elsewhere. My Instagram DM's were flooded with people asking me to drop the tutorial, and a couple people even commented on my YouTube videos as well. However, my Instagram follower count and YouTube subscriber count didn't really increase.
Overall, it was an interesting experience! If you've found me from TikTok, hi! hello! Hope you stick around :)
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