You are reading 3Bits & Change, Joseph's email about building a direct to consumer business on the internet. Today’s email was written to a bad station Alexa chose, again.
Good morning,
Three quick bits and a summary. Happy Tuesday.
Bit #1 • All the words in TikTok… even your first name
“Hey, Logan”
How do the videos get served?
When replying to comments on TikTok I typically say “Hey” and a part of the user name that asked the question. I’m aiming to be personable. To put a face to the relationship and use folks names. And I learned something about the algo. Or, at least I think I did.
Logan something or something asked a question. I started my reply with “Hey, Logan” and the comments started.
Here is the video, enjoy!
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Bit #2 • Heating
TikTok and ByteDance employees regularly engage in “heating,” a manual push that ensures specific videos “achieve a certain number of video views,” according to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes.
We have a less than stunning video over 4 million views. It lacks for the engagement numbers of others on the account. We think it’s been heated. More from Forbes on heating.
Why heat that video? No idea.
Bit #3 • Status
It’s February. There are +24 inches of snow in the Minneapolis forecast this week. Things are slow in the commerce arena. We out performed our forecast for Dec and Jan. Feb is slow! We get it. It’s not the holidays and the store is 14 weeks old.
We were on myTalk 107.1 radio this week talking knives and school lunch. It was fun to chat a bit live. I was reminded how fast time burns when it’s “live.”
We’re testing some retargeting ads in the Facebook machine. It’s still such a gamble. I’m not a gambler, except for Meta ads. The sponsorship of the podcast with SKOR flipped toward funny this week and some orders flowed in as a result.
The majority of customers in the shop say they found us by our signs around the building. And this all has me looking up the population density of different addresses. Where we are is 1/4 as dense as that of where we first started looking! Ugh.
I sure want it all to go faster. :)
Classes are off to a great start. The last one had 7 students and was a smash hit. Really really good. There is more where that came from.
We’re shifting focus to preparing for a new team member We’re revamping our retail packaging before going back on the lead generation train. And I’m planning the trip to Japan in April.
Sum
TikTok sure is listening and targeting and listening and targeting. They’re adding some heat too. And, we’re going to keep pushing here. Just keep pushing.
On Your Way
Enjoy the snow this week (or whatever your weather is).
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Order kitchen knives sharpened or give the gift of sharp at Vivront.com.