TLDR: Posting 20 times a day is an effective way to grow an audience on TikTok, as well as increase affiliate clicks, but is likely not a great plan for long term growth due to the potential for burnout.
You may have seen a social media guru in the past month or two sharing that creators are blowing up on TikTok by posting 20 or more times a day to the platform.
I (Kelly, creator and Willa events planner here!) love testing out new strategies, so I decided to give it a go. For a full week I posted to TikTok 20x a day, and I have to admit, the results are impressive from follower growth to affiliate links, my stats were better than I expected.
In just one week, I gained nearly 25K followers on the platform and saw significant increases in clicks to my Amazon storefront and LTK page.
Posting 20 times a day is an effective way to grow an audience on TikTok, as well as increase affiliate clicks, but is likely not a great plan for long term growth due to the potential for burnout.
Creating 20 videos a day took a significant amount of time. Not only for the creation of the videos but also scrolling through my FYP to search for trends. While I personally use a trend subscription, they only publish 1-3 audios per day. So scrolling on it’s own often took a significant amount of time.
The first day was a significant learning curve, and took closer to a full day of work. However, the next 6 days took closer to 4-5 hours per day to create 20 pieces of content.
Creatively, this was an exhausting experience. After a week I feel incredibly burnt out and ready for a week long nap. However, I think the longer you continue to work on creating videos at this volume, the more efficient you become. Just between the first day and the remaining days I improved significantly.
In addition, posting more videos led to more questions which helped alleviate some of the thought work of making videos. Capitalizing on trends also reduces some of the creative fatigue and burnout you may experience.
While I feel this is an effective way to grow an audience on the platform, I do not feel it is a strategy that is sustainable long term.
While I initially thought I would use a posting strategy to hit 20 videos a day, I really ended up not following through with it at all. I did try to prioritize replying to comments, but these generally were not big hits as far as views or growth. However, I still think these are particularly important for building a community that is engaged and knows they can count on you!
By not following too much of a set strategy I was able to post lots of different video styles to see what worked and what didn’t, such as testing the difference between posting an ootd flatlay vs. actually trying it on. Introduction videos, as I found in my last article about TikTok, convert to followers quite well, but I also wanted to see what types of content helped foster a community.
When posting at this volume (or any volume, really), you are bound to have some outright flops. I chose to private videos that did not perform well within 24-48 hours, but there are plenty of social media gurus who would not promote this. Some videos do take time to grow, but there is also the opportunity to try reposting those videos later potentially with a different audio or twist. For that reason, I opted to private the videos and try again with the concept to see if an adjustment would make a difference. This one I would say is more of a personal preference than a genuine strategy.
When making videos, I did not go out of my way to make affiliate focused videos, but I would say this could be an area to consider trying out. Even without focusing on it, questions naturally popped up about products I was using and I shared a haul of pieces I got from Amazon. As you can see below, my amazon affiliates page shows a significant increase in clicks and commissions when I started posting 20 times a day. While my LTK clicks have increased, it is tough to determine if this is from TikTok or Instagram as I post LTK links there more regularly.
I don’t know that I think the success of this strategy has so much to do with posting x times making the algorithm like you as it does with having to be on the platform, watch trending videos, and almost accelerate your rate of failure.
Unlike Instagram, your entire following is not going to see your content. So when you post a lot, there are simply more opportunities to go viral. If one out of every 100 videos is amazing and goes viral, and you go from posting 1 video a day to 20 videos a day, you’re going to end up with 4 viral videos a month instead of 1 viral video every 3 months.
When posting this many times a day, I was much more likely to have at least one video a day do well. In addition, it helped me test different content formats to see what my audience liked more & refine my video making skills because I was making so many videos.
You will certainly still see results with posting 3-6 times a day on TikTok, and probably still be able to sleep (something I look forward to doing again). However, if you are full-time and looking to scale on TikTok quickly, posting like this may be helpful.
In addition to growing on TikTok, I do generally see some trickle over to my Instagram account as well, even without necessarily being prompted to. However, my growth rate on Instagram has remained constant.
Since short form content is doing well across most social platforms, I am able to double the results by reposting my content to Instagram and Pinterest. In this way I can use TikTok as a testing ground to see what may perform well, then repost it to my Instagram account, while for Pinterest I typically repost everything I create.
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