Accidentally going viral on TikTok - what we learned

On Monday, we posted a quick TikTok for ParkSpeed: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR9N4NN7/

This was all done quickly. This weekend, we were heading out to film a long-form video for our YouTube channel, and had an idea. So we shot it.

On Monday morning, my partner posted it without a lot of effort. After all, our previous videos were getting a couple hundred views, and TikTok isn't our primary focus. We genuinely thought "oh, some other people might find this funny."

1.5 hours later, it had 69 views. About normal for our other videos.
2 hours later, it had 10,000 views. Dozens of comments. Wild, we thought.
24 hours later, 180,000 views.

Unreal. Thousands of likes. Strangers are arguing in the comments. And it just kept going and going, every time we thought it had peaked.

It seems like the wave finally crested. Two days in, it's getting about 100 views per hour.

What did we learn?

We have a few theories about what clicked.

1. We unintentionally tapped into a fairly controversial topic among Disney fanatics (the reservation system); so people are resonating with the absurdity of the situation.
2. the video is very short, so it's easier for viewers to watch in its entirety
3. there's no dialogue (just music and text), so the visual storytelling is what matters.

Maybe most importantly, we're not changing our focus. We're not going to go out of our way to chase views on TikTok. That seems like a recipe for disaster. Ultimately, these TikTok views haven't really translated into views of our YT channel, so we're not putting a ton of stock in it.

Posting high quality long form content on YouTube, at a relatively consistent schedule, remains our focus.

Still, the emotional high from launching an unintentional rocket ship is real.