Does Liking Your Own TikToks Help?

When creating videos for TikTok, you obviously want every advantage that you can get.

If you’re familiar at all with how the TikTok algorithm works, you may know that the more engagement that your TikToks receive (especially early on, shortly after it’s been posted), the more people your TikTok will be shown to on the For You page.

Essentially, the more people that interact with it, the more people TikTok decides to show it to you.

But can you give your own TikToks a jump start by liking them yourself? Does liking your own videos actually help it get more views?

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know.

Does Liking Your Own TikToks Help It Do Better?

Should you like your own TikToks, or is it a complete waste?

Unfortunately, it seems that liking your own TikTok does absolutely nothing to boost its performance – at least not directly. Liking your own TikToks doesn’t affect how many people its exposed to on the For You page, nor does it directly lead to any additional views.

What it does do however is show an additional person liked the video to others (since your like count will start at 1, instead of 0.) Due to something in psychology called the bandwagon effect, people are more likely to support something that other people also support. This means if early people exposed to your video already see that it has a good number of likes, they may be more inclined to like it themselves – which actually does help the video become more successful.

1 like – even if it’s just from yourself, is a form of social proof. Therefore, liking your own videos can help ever-so-slightly, at least indirectly.

However, the reason it doesn’t directly affect your video’s place in the algorithm comes down to keeping things fair.

TikTok wants to show videos that people truly enjoy, to the types of people most likely to enjoy them. For this reason, they go to great lengths to ensure that people aren’t able to trick the algorithm, and get more exposure than it might deserve.

We all want our TikToks to reach as many people as possible, but if TikTok’s user base doesn’t care, than TikTok wants to make sure people aren’t being shown content that isn’t interesting to them.

This is what keeps the app addictive – we aren’t shown much content that is low quality, uninteresting, or boring.

If there were things that people could do to trick TikTok into giving them more exposure, it would hurt the app for everyone. So, TikTok automatically filters out your own likes when weighing the engagement your video has received.

What If You Like It From An Alt Account?

If you have alternate or side accounts, you may be wondering – will it help if you like your own video from these other accounts?

The answer is it’s extremely unlikely. This is one of the easiest and most obvious ways to artificially boost your like count, and TikTok almost certainly filters these likes as well.

They can tell the accounts are tied together not only because they use the same network, but also the same exact device (your device ID is shared with TikTok as well.)

Is it worth liking your TikToks from your alt account anyway?

Personally, I would advise against it. While it may help indirectly due to social proof (as mentioned earlier), liking your own videos with a bunch of alt accounts crosses the line to potentially rule breaking behavior.

This would be a really silly way to get in trouble with TikTok, especially since it really doesn’t provide that much benefit.

Should You Ask Your Friends To Like Your TikToks?

Finally, let’s talk about something else.

You’re not liking your own TikToks, even from alt accounts. But should you ask your friends to? Or will TikTok know about this as well?

This one may actually work. However, if you want this to have the most impact, you shouldn’t ask for every single video that you put out, nor should you like each other’s TikToks all at once (otherwise referred to as spam liking.)

Additionally, this may be more effective if your friend happens to stumble across your video while browsing their feed themselves, rather than specifically going to your profile to like it.

Note however that even something like this isn’t going to guarantee that your video goes viral. If your video was never meant to receive tons of views, getting a few likes early on isn’t going to make that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

Your time would be much better spent actually improving your content, or coming up with more ideas to post.

Conclusion

Does liking your own TikToks help? Not really, at least not directly.

While it can be argued that having a bit of social proof on your TikToks increases the likelihood that more people will watch and like them as well, this makes a miniscule difference at best.

Ultimately, TikTok has put a lot of work into making sure their algorithm can’t be manipulated, and this is for the benefit of us all.

Have any questions or comments? Have you tried this, and how did it work out? Do us all a favor and share using the comment form below.

Thank you for reading, and I’m wishing you the best!

– James McAllister