One of the fastest ways to build a brand on TikTok is to simply come up with a list of competitors. Once you have found all your competitors on TikTok, you pay close attention to the videos that they produce and are showing in their channel.

You should be able to spot a pattern. You should be able to see a common theme. Once you have isolated a handful of themes that seem to come up again and again regardless of the competitor channel, you would have the information you need to produce and promote short videos that would hammer home that theme. With enough variations and with enough experimentation, you would be able to come up with videos that would attract a tremendous amount of attention on your niche in TikTok.

Ideally speaking, this is how things should work. The problem is there is one missing piece. If you’re blind to this problem then there’s a high chance that your TikTok branding campaign is not going to produce the kind of results that you are hoping for.

What is this glaring problem? Well, the problem is how do you pick the right TikTok videos to reverse engineer? It’s one thing to realize that a lot of your competitors’ videos share the same theme and topic. In fact, most people with average intelligence are going to be able to pick this out.

This is not all that hard. But the problem is which of these videos should you pay attention to? Well thankfully, TikTok is going to give you some signals that you should pick up in. If you are aware of these signals, then you can quickly prioritize which videos to reverse engineer and which videos to safely ignore.

The first signal, of course, is not that big of a surprise. Pay close attention to the number of views of a video. Sure, your competitor might have a hundred videos talking about the same topic, but it seems that they only have a handful of videos that have actually caught on with your target audience members.

Keep your eyes focused on these videos. There’s a reason why they have such a high viewership. Your job at this point in time is to figure out the reason why. Once you have identified high viewership videos, the next step is to look at engagement.

Please understand that a lot of your competitors are also fixing their chicken or egg or the empty restaurant effect problem by getting social proof. They basically buy views for their TikTok videos so they can get organic viewers to enjoy their materials and possibly share it and thereby create an organic following. You have to start somewhere, right?

Instagram video marketing also works this way. In fact, Instagram photo marketing works this way. It’s all about getting that initial social proof. The problem is when you’re trying to reverse engineer your competitors’ success, you have to discount social proof.

So, look for indicators of social proof engineering. If you notice that a video has a lot of views but very little engagement, that is a sign. Once you are convinced that the handful of videos that you have detected form your competitors are products of real viral popularity, you should then start paying close attention to the inner themes or subtexts of these videos. You can then come up with your own creations that have an even higher chance of succeeding with your target audience members.