TikTok Will End Vanity Metrics

If you’re a content creator, or if you use social media to raise awareness about yourself or your business, you may have heard of TikTok.

In fact, you’re probably hearing more and more about it as pretty much all marketers and gurus are trying to convince you to get on it.

It all started with Gary Vaynerchuck (as always) saying that TikTok was a way better opportunity today than Instagram. And he’s right about that. It’s possible, without having a single subscriber, to post a video and get thousands of views on it in 24 hours.

And that’s remarkable! Most social media platforms don’t let you get that much exposure anymore. Going viral used to happen this way on Facebook and then Instagram. But because these platforms have been massively monetized by their owner (Facebook), organic reach has decreased a ton, making it very unlikely for you to go viral overnight.

On Instagram, you can still get some interesting organic reach if you have a big following and a strong hashtag strategy. However, the dream of starting a new account and getting tens of thousands of followers within a month is pretty much out of reach.

That’s the true power of TikTok. It doesn’t matter if you have followers or not. If your content is good enough, it can get big on the platform.

Followers Don’t Matter

You can have zero followers on TikTok and still get views on your videos. TikTok has a very content-oriented algorithm. Your number of followers isn’t taken into account: If the community likes your video, TikTok will play it to a similar audience, and so on. That’s how you can upload a video and get thousands of views in no time.

Of course, there’s a massive luck factor here. The TikTok algorithm is quite unpredictable, and you might be surprised about what works and what doesn’t. But the reward is totally worth the try.

Subscribers is the metric that determines your reach, traffic, and success on all other platforms. If you think of YouTube, if no one gets exposed to your content, YouTube isn’t going to recommend it to anyone as they have no way to know if people would enjoy it. If you don’t have a solid base of followers, getting reach through hashtags on Instagram is very hard considering how competitive they are. If you don’t have likes on your Facebook page, literally no one besides yourself will see your post.

Subscribers is what determines the initial traffic to your content, allowing the social media platform to rank the pertinence of your content. From that rank, the algorithm will recommend your content to similar people.

TikTok bypasses that initial traffic and submits your content to a broader audience anyway, letting the people decide if your content is worth watching.

A Simplified Interface

When you come from any other social platform, the interface of the app can be a little surprising because of how minimalistic it is. The content is full screen, the caption is discrete and at the bottom, and a few metrics are on the sides.

When you browse the For You page and go from video to video, you can’t tell how many views a video has nor how many followers the creator has. The only metrics you see are the number of likes, comments, and shares. The emphasis is clearly put on the content, and the few displayed metrics aren’t distracting nor taking up much space.

This design choice really shows how much TikTok values content over vanity metrics. Plus, the design choice also reduces the importance of social proof. Since these metrics are less visible, users are less likely to like, subscribe, comment, and so on based on the popularity of a piece of content.

TikTok focuses on video and general user approbation.

A Future Without Metrics

With the rising popularity of TikTok and the fact that Instagram is hiding the number of likes on posts, it’s legit to start wondering about a future of social media without any sort of vanity metrics. No more likes, no more followers, no more views, no more social proof. Just content.

Audiences and communities will still exist, and their importance and impact will be accessible through influencer platforms such as Instagram’s Brand Collabs Manager, which allows agencies to find influencers and get a better read of these influencers’ audiences. However, the non-professional users wouldn’t have any sort of vanity metric available.

Such a change would be a total revolution in the way we approach social media. No more content to attract likes and followers. Just content that makes sense to people, content that people enjoy sharing. No more fear of underperforming. People will focus on their content instead of creating content to increase their metrics.

We can’t predict what will happen, but we can say that things are going this way. This is probably for the better, as these vanity metrics have been the number one focus of creators for years instead of their passion, drive, or content.