In a way, this blog post is also a For You Page: it was carefully created just for you, and the more you scroll, the more you’ll find content that you’re likely to care about. Except it was written by a human with bones and blood, and not determined by a series of TikTok algorithms.
Getting on the TikTok FYP, or For You Page, is extremely important when it comes to success on the platform: the FYP is where a billion global active users find new content, new accounts to follow and new brands to care about.
Here’s everything you need to know about getting on the FYP, straight from the human’s mouth.
What is the FYP (For You page) on TikTok?
The Tiktok FYP (For You Page) is a feed of content created for a specific user based on an algorithm. The FYP shows a mix of videos from accounts that the user follows and other videos that the platform believes the user will enjoy—in other words, the FYP makes predictions about what content you’ll find most engaging.
According to TikTok, each individual’s For You Page stream of videos is decided according to three main rankings:
- User interactions (this includes the TikToks you like, comment on, and share, including accounts you follow and content you make yourself).
- Video information (details like sounds, hashtags and captions)
- Device and account settings (for example, your language preference, location setting and type of device—but TikTok says this is the least important of the three)
How to get on the FYP: 15 tips
Use trending songs
Ever had a TikTok song stuck in your head? That’s because your FYP is often full of trending music—meaning that lots of creators are using the same songs in their videos. TikTok knows what music is trending and is more likely to put your video on the FYP if you hop on the trend.
Irish dance group Cairde often uses trending songs in their content—they’ve built an impressive follower base of 3.3 million, but their videos typically have engagement numbers that double, triple, or even 20x that number. That’s because their videos show up on FYP of users who don’t follow them, in part because they hop on (literally) music trends.
Many TikTok sounds also have their own built-in trends, which makes the content even easier to create. This chihuahua, for example, managed to edit this video in exactly the way that thousands of Gen Zers did. Old dog, new Tiks.
Use trending audio
Similar to the above — it’s not just songs that go viral on TikTok, it’s sounds. A sound byte from a TV show or movie or just the isolated audio from another TikTok can go viral, too. Put your own spin on trending audio clips to boost your wow factor and set you apart from other users with familar but unique content.
Then this dramatic audio began trending, and thousands of users found their own interpretations for the sound—time to work on your lip-synching skills.
Participate in trends
Sorry, one more reference to trends (hey, in the online world, trends are always tops): there’s an infinite opportunity for dance trends, prank trends, challenge trends and more on TikTok.
Not only will participating in trends make you more likely to get on the FYP… trends are also a no-brainer when it comes to content brainstorming. Rather than coming up with something that’s completely fresh, take a look at what others are doing (and do it better).
For example, when it felt like everyone (yes, chef, everyone) was binge-watching The Bear, many TikTok users decided to recreate the omelet featured on the show.
Potato chip brand Smith’s Chips posted their own how-to—appropriate, since the omelet in the television series has sour cream and onion chips sprinkled on top. This is an awesome example of using a trend to market your brand.
Be timely
The TikTok FYP is all about what is hot now… which often actually means predicting the future. When planning out your content calendar, think about holidays, occasions and seasons, and consider what you can do to make your TikToks matter at the time that they are posted.
Being timely might also mean that your TikTok is more useful (for example, no one wants pumpkin-carving tips on November 1).
Kelly Clarkson posted this TikTok at the perfect time—her cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” was relevant because the song is trending, plus the video went live right around Halloween. Freaky, festive and fabulous.
Post at the right time
Speaking of time: scheduling your TikToks to post at the optimal time will help more users take notice of your video, leading to more engagement, a higher ranking in the algorithm and making your video more likely to appear on TikTok For You Pages.
Hootsuite has experimented and drawn conclusions about the best time to post on TikTok in general (short answer? Thursday at 7:00 p.m.), but more accurate “best time” stats will change from user to user.
The good news is that Hootsuite also has built-in, personalized tech that will tell you when your best time to post on TikTok is. You can also use TikTok analytics to see when most of your followers are online, and pay attention to stats from videos you’ve already posted to find correlations between views and timing.
Encourage people to engage
Engagement is one of the biggest factors that leads to success on TikTok. There’s plenty of ways to boost your engagement rate on the platform (here are 5 ways to make yours higher), but there’s also a very simple engagement-boosting hack: just ask. Encourage viewers to comment, like, save and send your video to friends.
This speed reading challenge is an excellent example. The video challenges you from the very start, prompting you to pay attention and not scroll away. Viewers are encouraged to comment on the video if they can complete the reading challenge and to send it to a friend who might like a speed-reading test, too.
By asking folks to comment and share this video and by appealing to their sense of competition, the creator is getting more engagement — which leads to a higher ranking on the algorithm and a higher chance of ending up on a FYP.
Use the right hashtags
Trending hashtags are one element that helps TikTok figure out what your video is about — and we’re not talking about the ultra-basic #fyp. To figure out which TikTok hashtags to use, look to the experts: find your competitors (or, to use more positive language, other folks who are succeeding in your industry) and see which popular hashtags they are using.
It’s hard to go wrong creating #Swiftok content lately, and football social media managers have been working overtime on Taylor Swift-related videos. The delightful TikTok above tags #taylorswift, #erastour and #swifttok, so TikTok knows to share it on the For You Pages of her fans.
Tag your location
A user’s FYP will incorporate viral and not-so-viral videos from all over the world, but the TikTok algorithm also takes into account location when curating the For You Page. The platform assumes — usually correctly — that TikTok users will care about videos that were created in the same city, country or continent that they live in.
Take this invitation for a pop-up rave in Vancouver, for example. The creator tagged the location and used the hashtag #Vancouver in their description, indicating to the TikTok algorithm that users in Vancouver would likely care about the video.
The pop-up skytrain rave was apparently a success, likely in no small part due to the invite showing up on local user’s FYPs.
Collaborate with a creator
TikTok creators know all about how to get on the FYP. It’s how they gained their following: by creating engaging, entertaining content that users want more of. Collaborating with a successful creator on TikTok can expand your audience significantly, as you’ll automatically be more likely to be seen on the For You Pages of all the creator’s followers.
Hot tip: When collaborating with a creator, make sure that their niche aligns with yours in some way (in other words, the collaboration should “make sense,” for example, an athletic wear brand collaborating with an athlete or a kitchen retailer collaborating with a chef). The best partnership should be authentic and beneficial for both parties… actually, that’s good relationship advice, too.
Here’s a celeb example. Walmart collaborated with Mean Girls stars almost 20 years after the original release of the movie to create this viral advertisement (it has over two million views, hundreds of thousands of likes and tens of thousands of saves).
And on Lindsay Lohan’s account, the exact same video has over 20 million views, almost four million likes and 300,000 saves. Walmart significantly expanded its reach with this collaboration — get in losers, we’re posting TikTok collabs.
Collaborate with another brand
It’s not just creators that you can collaborate with: consider partnering with another brand to widen your reach and develop meaningful relationships with others in your industry. Just like a creator partnership, a brand partnership will expose you to the other brand’s followers (and their bank accounts) and vice versa.
And, also like a creator partnership, a brand partnership should be a genuine collaboration between two parties with similar values. Think a hot sauce brand partnering with a chicken wing restaurant, or a shoe company partnering with a sock company.
Post consistently
TikTok recommends posting 1 to 4 times per day… yes, per DAY. If that’s within reach for you as a social media manager, by all means, go absolutely buckwild with content. But for many, that’s not a realistic goal — and that’s totally okay.
At Hootsuite, we recommend posting 3 to 5 times per week. It’s a manageable goal to set, and also is consistent enough that you should be regularly appearing on your follower’s feeds. What’s most important is that you are repeatedly showing up on the app, and taking every opportunity you can get to get on the FYP.
(Plus, with Hootsuite, you can schedule your TikToks in advance — so 3-5 new videos a week might only mean a couple of hours of work one day a week.)
This TikTokker posts videos of dancing chickens— sometimes in costume — several times a day, and while all of them are eggcellent (sorry), they don’t all end up going viral.
Then again, there’a quite a few with millions of views. Sometimes, ending up on the FYP is a bit of a numbers game: you miss 100% of the Toks you don’t Tik.
Find your niche
This tip is true for every platform out there: when your content is geared towards a specific community, you’re more likely to find engaged followers who will stick with you. TikTok is unique in that niches can be almost unbelievably specific (I, for example, am consistently fed TikTok videos about ex-theatre kids working in corporate jobs) and that’s a great opportunity to narrow down your content and really focus on what matters.
The above video is just one of the hundreds of TikToks that performance artist Vita Kari has made. Their content almost always follows the same formula, and they’ve found a hyper-specific niche that is super engaging—their TikToks are like a guessing game, prompting viewers to comment and share.
Post before-and-after content
One of the metrics that the TikTok algorithm uses to rank videos is the time that viewers spend watching before they scroll away. And because TikTok is so rich with content, you’ll want to grab an audience’s attention in the first precious seconds: give them a reason to keep watching.
Sharing before-and-after content, behind-the-scenes or process videos is an excellent hack for grabbing attention—the instant gratification that a viewer gets from seeing results prompts them to pay attention. This photoshoot behind-the-scenes is an awesome example… once you see the first before-and-after, you’re tempted to watch the rest.
Stitch other videos
Stitching trending videos is another way to hop on a trend—often, videos asking a question or prompting a story will go viral because of their stitchability. Just like song trends and sound trends, stitch trends are favoured by TikTok’s algorithm.
This video proves that stitches lead to success: there are hundreds of stitches, some with millions of views.
Also: don’t forget to embrace serendipity. Okay, that advice sounds a little like something you’d read in a fortune cookie—but serendipitous coincidences and can’t-believe-it’s-true circumstances do super well on TikTok.
For example, when one TikTok user remarked “Y’all remember the days when going viral got you on Ellen?”, ex-child singer (and current adult singer) Greyson Chance took the opportunity to stitch it—after all, he went viral and got on Ellen in 2010.
Be yourself
In the end, trends and hacks can’t really top straight-up authenticity: it’s a quality that TikTok claims to champion, and often, the For You Page proves it.
The virality of this video proves it: who wouldn’t love seeing a daughter trying to save her family’s business on their feed? Being yourself and creating genuine, authentic content won’t just get you on the FYP, it will help convert some of those lucky views to real follows.
Grow your TikTok presence alongside your other social channels using Hootsuite. Schedule and publish posts for the best times, engage your audience, and measure performance — all from one easy-to-use dashboard. Try it free today.
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