Consume to create is my preferred process to learn something. It’s effective in pretty much anything and the idea is simple.
Consume to Create.
Consume: Immerse yourself in whatever it is you are looking to improve. If it’s Photoshop, you watch a load of tutorials, read Reddit threads, seek out the leaders in the field. Watch, listen and learn from them.
Create: Take what you’ve learned, and try it out, jump straight in and go at it for 20mins or so. You’ll come across bumps, which you can make a note to go back and learn later. It’s the act of exploring and making mistakes where we learn the most.
Sometimes it’s hard and overwhelming to get started, that’s why the consume bit at the beginning is important. It lets you be passive for a second there and take it in. You have to then force yourself to do though.
I’ve recently been having a lot of success with this strategy on TikTok.
Download the app and the first thing you want to do is to enjoy the For You Page (FYP). See what people are doing, what music they are creating their videos to, find out what jokes are ‘in’.
Hit the heart/like button on stuff you like, I use it as a means to curate a bit of a bookmarks page. On your profile, you will have a Likes tab and in here are all your liked videos. (You can hide this tab from the public) and in here is everything I want to remember. Of course inspirational, moving, memorable or funny finds itself in here. But, mine is heavily a feed of useful listicle videos, tips, tricks and hacks that I want to remember!
Follow people. A lot of people will apply the niche principle and produce content for that specific topic. If you swipe over to the right, you get their profile and can find out what else they’ve done. Following people will improve your FYP.
You can spend hours browsing, and for anyone new to the platform I would highly encourage it. Bask in the guilt of being an unproductive slob! It will all pay off very soon!
Once you’ve followed all the interesting people, like everything that interested you – You’re FYP will be pretty curated. You will no doubt have noticed actually how fast this happens, A single watch or like can prompt it to show you something eerily on point!
In the Discover tab, you’ll be able to search for specific topics, but also importantly see what is trending. TikTok fills this page with the stuff it is pumping ou to people. Right now, you can just use these hashtags in any post and get eyeballs. It’s not the greatest strategy but it works to get the ball rolling on your profile. After you’ve posted 10+ posts I would push you towards the typical approach of combining 1:2:3 traffic keywords. For every big hashtag – over 500million posts, you’d put in 2 medium and 3 small. Medium is about 1-500million. Small would be under the million – These numbers may well reduce as more people come on. But for now, a million posts isn’t actually as big as it would be on Instagram surprisingly!
So, we’ve consumed. You’ll have noted some trends and a few things you want to get involved in or felt inspired by. Depending on whether you’re approaching this from a personal or marketing perspective, will decide how we do these next steps.
If you’re a personal account, jump in and create! Duet, use the sounds, copy, pay homage to, tag, weak and remix everything that you loved. TikTok loves authenticity and realness. Be yourself, comment, like, follow and have fun. The more you make, the more you’ll understand and get those endorphin hits!
If you’re using this as a marketing opportunity, I would still push you towards remixing and adding your own spin but add that brand/business element. Translate it into a way that your business audience will find it interesting.
An example might be lip-syncing, TikTokkers do it all the time. Is there a particular film that relates to your niche that you could lip-sync to?
If you’re a bar/cafe, can you spin in any of the ‘Karen’ videos into how it is serving a ‘Karen’?
As a cinema, there’s a tonne of opportunity to re-enact scenes from films with your staff
If you’re a yoga teacher, how can you remix the #tshirtchallenge
Consume to create.
