246 people watched me drink a cup of water

 It was this one too.

Okay, explanation time obviously. 

This was a post that I put up on Tik Tok and it involved a 9 sec clip of me drinking water out of an interesting cup in the office. It took all of 30 seconds of thought to plan, 9 seconds to film, another minute to add the voiceover and text and maybe 60 seconds or less to work out which Hashtags to include in the final piece.

In the end it came out thus:

@alshieldwrites I don't understand you coffee cup.. #moustache #coffee #atwork #theoffice #water #drinkwater #confused #wtf #idontknow #emotionaldamage ♬ original sound - Alshieldwrites

I posted it up yesterday afternoon at work during a quick water break and this morning at the time of writing (roughly 18 hours later) it's been viewed 240 times and counting.

And you may be wondering what's so great about something having just a couple of hundred views? Especially when there's Tik Tok's bringing in millions of viewers? 

It's the simple fact that if I put it through any other available medium, it wouldn't have gotten even a tenth of that count with a 24 hour period. 

CASES IN POINT

BLOGGER

The article before this one about my audiobook project took roughly 30 minutes to flesh out and post up. In the first day of hanging around this site, it got viewed 18 times.

At the time of writing, it's been viewed 27 times over the last 7 days. Not the worst for a blog post but not great compared to 240 views in a day.

What about the Audiobook project itself? Well, that brings us to: 

YOUTUBE 

The audiobook project took many sessions over a month in the studio and a lot of editing at home, uploaded chapter by chapter and then in one big hit at the end of it (and that took about 8 hours of rendering all up too)

Since uploading it to YouTube, it's been watched 5 times. Yep, just 5.

The Tik Tok I made promoting it though?

 

@alshieldwrites Adventures of Almigo now on #youtube#audiobook #audio #writertok #authortok #freeaudiobooks #freeaudiobook #youtubeaudiobook #comedybook #freebook ♬ original sound - Alshieldwrites

231 views and counting. Staggering in comparison. But what about...

TWITTER

I have far more followers on Twitter than I do TikTok currently (598 vs 68) so there'd be more views in a day for something I tweeted yeah?

Yeah no.

 Uhh okay.

FACEBOOK

On my personal page, I might get something between 10 and 25 likes if I posted up the cup post, on my writing page even less. But far less chance of it being discovered in the wild outside of friends, family and coworkers. 

I think you can see where I'm going with this one...

BUT WHAT EXACTLY IS THE CUP THING DOING FOR YOU?

Good question! If nothing else, it's bringing new eyes to my profile which in turn hopefully helps out the other stuff I've posted up, especially when I flex the creative muscle and create something involving my writing. 

This one I actually put together on the couch outside my house. I'd forgotten my keys and while I waited at home for my wife to arrive, I figured I'd do a post on my current writing project involving its tentative cover. This was done all on my phone and didn't take long at all: 

 

@alshieldwrites #books #cyberpunk #newbook #workinprogress #nextbook #booktok #books #bookshelf #amwriting #scifi #scifibooks #authorsoftiktok #alshield #authortokers ♬ Short Change Hero - The Heavy

In a little over a week since it was posted? 910 views and growing. I would kill to have that kind of viewership on anything I was doing anywhere else, especially YouTube. 

Has it translated into book sales? Not yet. But if I continue posting up stuff that connects as well as this has in such a short time, hopefully that will become a thing. If not it's still awareness of me, my writing and creativity and that's not a bad thing in the slightest!

Long story short, if you want a quick audience - then it definitely pays to investigate Tik Tok.

So is this the end of this blog then?

Ha ha, no. Tik Tok has it's uses but blogging like I do isn't one of them. There's still plenty more to do, write and upload here and I thoroughly enjoy doing what I do here. Rest assured the usual litany of posts will continue in conjunction with the occasional quick and dirty upload to Tik Tok. 

Oh and I'll still keep drinking plenty of water. Tik Tok doesn't need to point out how important that is daily, I already knew that before I reached for the humorous mug..