This is what I learnt from my conversation with a TikTok influencer

I spent some time with someone who has been working with social media across three decades, and more recently has been working with TikTok. Here are four things I took away.

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I really enjoyed my conversation with Justin Brierley as part of the Stronger conference earlier this year. For those who don’t know him, Justin is Theology and Apologetics editor for Premier: Unbelievable?. He hosts radio shows and podcasts including ‘Unbelievable?’ and the ‘Ask NT Wright Anything' podcast. He is the author of 'Unbelievable? Why, after ten years of talking with atheists, I’m still a Christian’.

He also has a rapidly growing audience on TikTok and that’s partly why I wanted to get him on the programme to hear some of the back story.

Before we get into details though, let’s review some of the stats for his personal and professional channels

Twitter: 23.7k followers
IG: 49.6k followers
Youtube: 166k subscribers
TikTok: 248.7k followers

So as you can see, there’s something he’s doing that’s hitting the mark with people and I thought, if we interviewed him, perhaps we could learn a few things. I was right. Below are three things I’ve taken away and reflected on as part of my conversation with Justin Brierley.

1.Don’t be afraid to fail

This is what Justin said in our conversation:

People often say that there are ten failures before a success, and that's certainly true of myself. There have been a lot of things we’ve tried, which haven't gone anywhere, but now we seemed to have found something that does work. So I think it's about being willing to try and to fail, and to just ask God to be there in the process as you go through that.

I really resonated with this. For years I think the thing that kept me from putting content out on social media was a fear that it might not be well received. What might people think. What if I get it wrong. What if people don’t like it.

It was just fear, plain and simple. If that’s you too, can I encourage you to not worry about that. If you have a vision, or idea, or burning to get going on social media, just give it a go. For me, the vision of ‘what could be’ won out. I couldn’t hold back anymore. I went headlong into a producing content on social media at a time when a lot of my friends were detoxing from social media. The question ‘what if’ gave way to a more powerful question: ‘why not?’.

As I started moving forward, I found that God was there, and he was opening doors, and I started learning and observing and experimenting. This brings me to the next point.

2.Experiment with content

This is what Justin said:

‘I can honestly say it's all down to my 16 year old son because he was on TikTok before me and he said, ‘Dad, you should try this out because I think some of your thoughts could work well.’

What was so interesting is that he hadn’t been planning this for months. He hadn’t been sitting there wanting to be a TikTok influencer. He simply gave it a go and see what happened. This is what he said about the first video he posted which had almost half a million people view it:

Essentially that the video was me doing a sort of 60 second version of a video that I'd done on YouTube a couple of years ago

He didn’t spend any money making a new video, he didn’t spend lots of time planning it, he simply reworked some existing content and re-posted it on TikTok. The result: explosive.

I did the same with the only viral video I’ve ever posted. It was a repost of an IG story that I did. It was a random video too, but TikTok seemed to like it and attracted 80k views.

Now views aren’t everything, but the point was experimenting with content, seeing what works, just trying things, taking feedback, see what connects.

As an aside, just in the same way that Justin’s son said that his content might do well on TikTok, I’ve done the same for numerous people too and I would encourage you to do the same. If you think someone you know might gain some traction with their content on a particular content – don’t keep it to yourself. Tell them.

3.Get straight to the point

Another key point from my conversation with Justin, this is what he said:

You’ve got to go straight in there, no waffling…you've got you've basically got about two or three seconds with TikTok to capture someone's attention, and so that's the key..if you can do that, then the algorithm basically does the rest of the work. 

I’ve done it. We’ve all done it: ‘I’m just jumping on here to say….’. Hi I’m Matt, and I’m just spending a bit of time on this video…’. I like Justin’s encouragement and so I thought I would head over to his TikTok and note down the first sentence of some of his videos to see how he does it. Check it out:

‘Can science explain everything? No….’
‘Can we solve the puzzle of whether there’s a God’?
‘If God created the universe, then who created God?’
‘I’ve never met a non-believer..’
‘Can you celebrate Christmas without believing in Jesus?’

These are all very strong openers. They set up the content of the video in the first 1-2 seconds. He poses a question, he connects with the listener immediately.

Learn from this. I will. No more waffly openers.

4.Be where people are

Justin said this:

TikTok is one example of the way in which our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, the fact that you need to kind of communicate something in 60 seconds or less…And it's very difficult to communicate anything meaningful in such a short space of time…but then do we sort of just stand up and sort of denounce this, and you know, say, Isn't it all awful the way culture is going? Or do we actually say, ‘okay, look, this is where the culture is, and this is where people's attention spans are, and this is the way people are consuming their media, so let's do what we can within that’, and hopefully, we can we can sow a seed, we can do something.

This was the thing that turned my consumption of content into production of content several years ago. From silence to showing up. This is where a lot of people are spending a lot of time and we the Church, as in every generation, are called to show up and be salt and light wherever people are. I was changed.

Justin thought there is a big opportunity on TikTok too. He said this:

…that’s why I think there is a value to engaging with those platforms…I think platforms like TikTok are vastly underserved at the moment by the Church, because people think it’s about doing funny dances, but actually, there's an awful lot of people and it's an incredibly young sort of platform.

More than that, Justin commented that there is a lot of openness to spiritual conversation and engagement on TikTok. This is what he said:

‘There's less kind of outright scepticism than you might find if you were putting these same videos that I put on TikTok, on Twitter. On Twitter I might just get barrages of atheists, you know, saying how terrible my ideas are, but it's interesting on TikTok, there's like this openness..’

Conclusion

A lot in the conversation and there was more besides, especially on how he set up a podcast in the early 2000’s and how it has steadily grown and other learnings about social media too. You can watch the full session here.

But as you step out in faith and create content to connect with people, don’t foget: Don’t be afraid to fail; Experiment with content; Get straight to the point and Be where the people are.