[What Data Says] TikTok Virality Secrets: Does a TikTok Account’s Number of Fans Influence Virality Speed?

Thanks to its highly trainable, machine-learning-based algorithm, TikTok nowadays has become the most effective virality enabler.

In an attempt to get increased exposure, which ultimately translates into more sales, many businesses have tried to understand the TikTok virality-producer content recipe that, once replicated, could skyrocket their brands.

While virality is influenced by multiple factors, for starters, we were curious to see how an account’s follower base impact virality. Let’s dig into the data together!

Ever since different accounts, trends, and campaigns gained virality on TikTok and enjoyed the attention of billions of social media users, there are a couple of questions circling around the internet related to what is the TikTok virality formula these days.

One of them is about how long it takes for a TikTok video to get viral.

According to data, the average time in which a TikTok video reaches its peak in viewership is of two weeks.

However, while addressing this, keep in mind that it doesn’t implicitly mean that every video on TikTok will become viral after two weeks.

To be honest, in the end, there is pretty hard to predict specifically which content will get viral on TikTok, given there are multiple components taken into consideration by the algorithm, from the usage of trending songs to integrated hashtags and many more.

Now, when talking about TikTok, we all know that for being a video-oriented platform, the number of views is a more relevant performance metric than the number of followers, as opposed to other social platforms’ cases.  

However, this doesn’t mean that the follower base isn’t still an indicator of an account’s capacity to offer value to the network’s users.

The best proof of this lies in the data, which showed that an account’s follower base could influence its speed until reaching virality. For example, accounts with a higher number of followers are more likely to reach virality sooner than profiles with fewer followers.

While the smallest accounts reach their video viewership peak 16 days after being published, on average, the largest account’s average viewership peak day is 14.

How to get into the nitty-gritty of deconstructing TikTok’s virality?

We at Socialinsider love to dig into the data and offer you powerful insights to optimize your social media strategy.

To do so, we’ve put our scientists clothes on and came up with a series of new TikTok metrics that can help you better understand TikTok virality.

Check out Socialinider's TikTok analytics tool to discover our revolutionary TikTok virality metrics and learn how to boost your account!

Methodology

We know TikTok is a wild card. You may have noticed or heard that at times, some videos get crazy number of views, some other times lesser views, but amazing engagement. And there are obviously the cases when some videos do not perform that well neither in terms of views, neither in terms of engagement.

As mentioned before, not all videos on TikTok get viral - that’s up to the platform’s algorithm that takes into consideration a series of criteria the videos need to meet.

However, let’s focus a bit on those that GET viral. In TikTok’s case, we know that virality may happen overnight. But what about those videos where that does not happen like that?

Socialinsider’s virality peak metric was invented in an attemp to identify how long does it take, on average, for a video to get viral in the case of those that do. Correlated with the data presented, a takeaway of this research is that if after 14 days after being published a video did not get viral, there are less chances to do so moving forward.

For this research we analyzed 1,097,833 tiktok videos published between January 2022 - June 2023.

Virality peak is a custom metric developed by Socialinsider that measures the day in which a TikTok video stops having an increase in viewership that’s greater than 3% for two days in a row.

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