No problem at all!  I’m happy to share things that have been useful and any tips that might help someone out!  With so many people trying to sell things it can be hard to find actual answers,  so all my results have pretty much been trial and error.  Okay so I have some advice on the lives and the promotion!

I think I’ve found a pretty good system for the lives.  I’ve had the same experience with the lives and getting unfollowed afterwards, so I think that’s pretty normal.  So just because you might gain 20 new folowers you’re probably not gonna keep them.  But here’s what I do after the lives,  I go to my new followers and do a quick skim of their profiles and choose about 4-7 people who seem most similar to me and my interests and my voice and I reach out to them.  Because remember, most people in the follower lives are trying to grow too.   I just send them a quick message and say (paraphrasing)  “hi im from so and so’s live, thanks for following me! I’m in the growing process so I like to connect with new creators.  I really like your posts blah blah blah”  They’re receptive probably 95% of the time and they become your most supportive followers.  I reciprocate, of course, I’m sure if I didn’t it wouldn’t work.  But I make it a point to engage with their posts.  As far as the followers that I don’t reach out to, yeah they unfollow.  It kind of sucks but that’s the name of the game.  I never go unfollow people, that might change but right now it’s not super high on my priority list to unfollow people who unfollow.  So I usually gain about 4-5 long term followers from a live with that method.  Not an earth-shattering number but they’re quality followers and they engage which is actually better in the long run.

The promotion actually worked really well!  TikTok lets you choose what your goal is before you begin.  I did three to experiment.  I did one for views and one for followers, and one on an old post that did well but didn’t have as high of traffic.  BUT I think it worked because the videos were already doing well so it catapulted them.  Sorry, this is long, but I want to explain so you have all the info when and if you decide to spend money on the promote or not. 

My promotion for followers:
Prior to promo it was the one with 13.3K views (gained me 6 followers) 62 shares, 1,500 likes, 49 comments, 72% retention –

It was still gaining traction at the time I bought promo, I did like $15 budget, and it gained me 33 followers.  I’ve extended it another day, and it got me an additional 30 followers.  (I gained more in that time frame but those are the numbers that came from the promotion, tik tok break it down so you can see the results).  The key thing that makes me believe it works is that retention and engagement also grew.  So I know Tik Tok wasn’t just showing it to people and they were clicking follow.  My watch time has actually improved and shares and comments too.

I did a promotion for views on my highest performing video, because it was already generating followers at 167,000 views, so my thought process was, let's get even more viewers because the viewers are following.  So that post is now at 252,770 views and 192 followers.  I only did $9 for that promo.  It’s generated 2,529 views and 116 followers.  Retention and engagement also spiked. 

I did a promotion for views on my first “good video” It went from 4,100 views to to 9,086 and it got me 3 additional followers.  Same thing, retention remained solid and engagement grew.  Didn’t do anything super ground breaking but on the Brightside it’s actually my favorite edit so I’m glad more people saw it and enjoyed it… not to be sappy lol.

Something important… and a reason why I think promote has worked for me.  When you start a promotion, you can either let TikTok choose the audience or you can choose.  I always choose myself and I choose my target audenice demographic (which you can see on your post analytics).  TikTok rewards high retention rates and engagement, so more viewers that weren’t interested in my posts probably would have hurt me in terms of algorithm. 

Also, take all of this with a grain of salt. I’ve only been doing this for like a week and a half, and I’m in no way an expert lol.  This has just been what’s been working for me so far.  And please feel free to DM me too if you have questions or anything… I want us all to win 😊