As you may or may not know, I have been putting some effort back into the short vertical videos to try and grow my audience. I've been working on two platforms because Instagram is bullshit. I've been putting up Shorts on YouTube and mirroring them on TikTok. When I had done this last year, I would get similar performance for the videos across both platforms, but no growth on TikTok.
For most of last year I was primarily posting videos recorded on my phone and uploaded to the platforms, but when I started doing them again this year I decided to try clipping the live streams. I had tried that last year along with clips of the shorter videos, and they didn't perform well at all in either location, although I did get some views on YouTube. I have been testing them for a little over two weeks now along side a couple of phone videos (since doing no streams last week meant I had nothing to clip) and I have discovered something interesting:
- YouTube performance is all about content. The phone videos performed more poorly than the clips because I said TikTok in them and YouTube supresses content that mentions a competitor platform.
- I have a total of 5 views across all of the clips for the last two weeks on TikTok, but the phone videos (two of them) have combined over 1,000 views. TikTok seems to supress videos uploaded from desktop (at least on smaller accounts), possible to get you to pay for boosts or whatever. I suspect this because I don't think you can upload from desktop unless you're a brand or business account of come kind.
So it's looking like I'm going to have to hit each platform with a different strategy, which may take some work. But I'm willing to put in that work if I can make it happen. It will be an interesting experiment as I will be doing more parallel testing.
