The Smartest Way to Grow on TikTok in 2025

Are you struggling to get views on TikTok? Wondering how to escape 200-view jail and start growing your audience?

In this article, you'll discover how to understand and leverage the TikTok algorithm to create content that gets views, builds an audience, and drives business results.

Why Understanding the TikTok Algorithm Matters for Growth

Understanding the TikTok algorithm is important because the platform completely changed the social media landscape with its interest-based algorithm. 

Mike Yanda suggests that social media is no longer about friends following you for life updates, but about people being served content around the things they are interested in. 

This shift, which originated with TikTok, means that if you can win there—where 98% of your views are coming from people that don't know you—those skills will translate to other platforms like YouTube and Instagram, as they have also shifted their algorithms to be more interest-based in an effort to keep up with audience expectations.

You must understand the algorithm to succeed.

About TikTok: 200-View-Jail, Demographics, and Content Lifespan

Many people get stuck in what is commonly referred to as 200-view-jail and get frustrated, which causes them to stop before they have a chance to blow up. 

This “jail” isn't actually a real thing, but rather an effect of what happens when TikTok shows your video to a small sample audience to figure out its quality. The platform determines what goes viral by pitting your content head-to-head with other videos, and those with the most views, watch time, and engagement are the ones that get pushed out more broadly. 

If you're not getting beyond 200 views, your content isn't good enough yet; it's a skill you have to learn. You might be making great content, but not packaging it correctly to get people to stop scrolling the feed, or you might be confusing the algorithm by posting on too many topics, leading to it showing your content to the wrong people.

If you're stuck at 200 views, Yanda urges you not to get discouraged because it is part of the process. He considers this part of TikTok a safety zone in which you can learn, experiment, and test ideas before everyone knows about you.

Another common misconception is the belief that the audience on TikTok is too young or that the platform isn't good for lead quality. This is untrue, as the older demographic on social media apps is aging up very quickly. 

Yanda mentions a client, Jared, who was a fitness coach working with older, post-menopause women, and he started on TikTok and blew up, bringing in $75,000 in sales in his first month. This was possible because the coach immediately started talking to his ideal client and tailoring all his messages perfectly to them, which led to him going viral very quickly and completely changed his business.

A final consideration for TikTok is the shelf life of a video and the effect of bad videos. Videos are mostly independent of one another, so a bad video will not stop future good ones from getting views, and a viral video does not guarantee the next one will get more than 500 views. 

You're probably going to get most of your views in the first few days or the first week, and sometimes a video can be picked up and take off 30 days later. This shorter shelf life creates a snowball effect where you can have consistent traffic because multiple videos are going at one time. This also means it is harder to take a break from posting, and you cannot expect one viral video to fuel your business for the entire year.

How to Create Effective TikTok Video Content

TikTok is a very approachable and easy place to start for creating content, building a personal brand, and growing an audience. The platform does not require fancy or elaborate editing or equipment. The culture on TikTok is very casual, feeling more like you're talking to your friend on FaceTime, so you can simply pull out your phone, share your thoughts, and still do well.

These tips will help you succeed more quickly.

#1: Focus on the Metrics TikTok Values

While TikTok puts out a lot of announcements and documentation about its creator rewards program, which can reveal what they want, Yanda warns that there is also misinformation out there. For instance, despite people talking about SEO on TikTok, the platform has stated that anything not on the screen or in the description isn't being used, which means sliding keywords off the screen will not work.

When discussing monetization and views, TikTok talks a lot about play duration, which they actually define under the creator rewards program as watch time plus finish rate. This means they want people to watch a large percentage of your video and they want people finishing it. They would rather you make a 60-second video and a high percentage of people finish that video, and maybe even watch it again, rather than a much longer video where people only watch a small portion.

To increase your play duration, creating savable content is really, really helpful.

If someone is scrolling in the grocery store but sees a video they want to save, they may watch it later that evening or a week later, watching it the whole way through or even watching another part, which results in big play duration, watch time, and finish rate.

Engagement is another big factor. Yanda says he can always tell when his clients are about to blow up because they start getting a lot of the same people repeatedly commenting on their content. This means that after discovering the creator on the For You Page and following them, these fans are watching every video you put out and commenting, which helps the content hit the required magic metric for play duration and take off. 

Engagement also helps because your video is playing when people are engaging. If somebody is commenting to ask you a question or they're commenting to disagree with you, the video is looping.

Yanda advises that in the early days, you should respond back to those who comment, ask them questions, and get them to come back to the video, because the platform's algorithm will see them watching it a second or third time. This strategy helps the performance of all your content.

#2: Find Content That Feeds TikTok’s Platform Retention

The concept of topical demand is very important because TikTok wants to keep people on the platform. Because of the short shelf life of videos, when one video goes viral, TikTok immediately looks for another video like that in order to satisfy the demand. If someone watches content about a problem—for example, how to escape the “200 view jail”—then they are going to be interested in more content about that until they have actually solved the problem for themselves.

You can have a lot of success by filling that demand. If you're paying attention to what is working for other people and are seeing the videos that they are having a lot of success with, you should be making your versions of those ideas because you're giving TikTok the content that is going to fill the demand for those people in that topic. 

This is going to increase your chances of getting the big views. Unlike YouTube, where one video can feed the same video to people for a year because of SEO rankings, TikTok needs new videos on the same topics 365 days a year to fill the insatiable demand. If you can help them with that mission, you're going to get rewarded.

An example of this working is a mindset coach Yanda recently worked with who was sharing whatever he wanted and was very frustrated with his lack of views. Yanda encouraged him to get a little bit more focused and pay attention to what other people in his niche were doing to draw inspiration. The client, who was initially excited about getting his first three followers, went from 500 followers to 10,000 in about a week, and a week after that, he was at 28,000 followers. This massive growth was achieved because he knew who he was, what he was passionate about, started looking for inspiration from others, and saw what was working for him.

If you're excited but unsure where to start, Yanda says that if you're already posting but not getting views, it means you're not filling the demand. If you're a beginner, you need to follow the same process, which is to learn the platform and what people are actually interested in.

TikTok makes it super easy to figure out what people want because the views are so scattered. The key is to pay attention to other creators in your space and look for outliers. You're looking for creators who usually get 1,000 to 2,000 views per post, but who have a video that gets 100,000 views, or those who get 10,000 to 50,000 views but get a million views on a single post.

Pro Tip: Curate Your Feed With Two Profiles

To curate your feed to see the most relevant content, Yanda recommends creating two accounts: one for fun and mindless scrolling, and one for your business. 

On the business account, search keywords and terms in your niche and watch content that has big views, then follow creators you like and save their content. When you're scrolling and you see a video you would not create, click on it and say you are “not interested”. If it is a relevant video, just let it play for a little bit. 

By doing this for 10 to 15 minutes, you will coach the algorithm to show you the most viral content in your niche, making content research very easy because every time you open the app, you save two or three recent, high-view videos.

#3: Model Outlier Content to Speed Up Your Success

When you find outlier content, the first thing to do is save the video in a TikTok collection dedicated to ideas or research. Once you have saved them, you can go back and look for things that are similar because you will start to notice patterns. 

Since TikTok is such a trending platform, success is about pattern recognition. Yanda recommends looking at the text they have on the screen, which he calls the headline, and what people say in the first two to three seconds, which is your hook. If you cannot get them to watch beyond that, they will swipe past all the valuable information you have to share.

Yanda suggests modeling what is working, which is a process he learned from the book Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, which posits that artists learn by mimicking other artists to master techniques. 

The foundation of growing on TikTok is to find proven ideas because you don't know what works, and then take that idea and make your version of it. If they have text on the screen, use that exact same text, whatever that topic is. 

You should use the headline that is helping get people to stop scrolling. You should also use the hook, the first line that they say to grab people's attention. You should not say the same words, plagiarize it, or copy it word for word, but instead use your personality and perspective to do your own three things. Now you have a much higher chance of filling that demand, actually getting the big views, and breaking through the 200 view jail.

Yanda offers an example of this process with the mindset coach client he worked with. Yanda helped him find a creator who did not have a big audience but had one very big outlier video that was perfect for him. The client was told to use the outlier video's headline and hook, and then share his own points in his own words. Within a 48-hour period, the client took that research and made a video that got millions of views and gained 12,000 followers. The client's success led him to start remaking that video (rerecording it, not just reposting) a few times a month, and every time, it would go viral to different levels, from 10,000 to 100,000 views.

The way to scale is to play on your greatest hits by remaking the good content. You can categorize outliers into two phases: 

• The first is when you're new and model others to figure out what works for you and develop your voice. 
  
  
• The second type is when one of your videos goes viral. Once you have a collection of viral videos, you might have three, four, five, or six videos that always do numbers for you, and you can just remake them every month. 

This is the Pareto principle, where the 20% of your content does 80% of the work, and this is the secret to success on any social media platform.

When Yanda remakes his own successful content, he makes it as close as he can to the original. If he can sit in the same chair and just wear a different shirt, he will say the script all word for word. But then he will also riff on it and talk about it in a different way to see how that works, or he will take the same hook and headline and apply it to a different topic he talks about. 

This process creates templates for yourself that make content creation really easy. Since they are driving the bulk of your growth and lead flow, you can then just start to play and experiment. 

During this time, you will kind of learn to read the matrix and intuitively understand what works, allowing you to get inspired and record a new thing that goes viral, because you're recording it with the view of understanding the kind of hook and headline you need to use. However, you cannot do this early on because it is a skill that takes practice, and you increase your luck by studying what works.

Pro Tip: Stay on Topic

Yanda emphasizes that you must stay in your niche and be consistent with the topic you're talking about. If you aren't consistent, your content will be shown to the wrong people. 

For instance, if you post a fitness video that does well, but the next one is about a different topic, the fitness-interested people will swipe past it, and the next time you post, TikTok will be back at square one because it doesn't know who to show your content to. 

Every video you post gives data to the algorithm about who you are and who they should show your content to. Yanda advises to focus on your topic in the feed, and even when you're not getting views, don't delete your videos, as they can take off later and help the algorithm categorize you.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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