Miscellaneous TikTok and video-general Tips

• Film with a plain-ish background, in natural light if possible.

• Have all videos reviewed before posting publicly so we maintain consistency (and because we want to hear each other’s jokes)

• Keep your transitions tight-- users will scroll absurdly fast if there’s dead air :/

• If you’re editing directly on TikTok, make sure to add closed captions, and do so somewhere in the center of the frame-- otherwise we risk having them covered up by subtitle and sidebar text when they’re on user feeds! There is an option to do this automatically, but make sure to go in and edit for spelling and punctuation (especially on jargony words)

• Make sure any text is large enough to be readable, and in high-contrast color against the background.

• “Allow Duet” and “allow stitch” can be off or on, but you might want to turn them on if you invite people to interact with your video!

• Avoid flashing effects.

• For professionalism and accessibility, use keep filters, special effects, and voice effects only when they are relevant to the content of your video.

• Use lots of stickers and visual references to keep people interested!

• If you don’t want your voice on the tiktok, you can use the text-to-speech function on tiktok and make the robot lady say it for you. (the robot’s mispronunciations add a certain level of hilarity to it though)

• Because of the snowball effect and focus on going viral, users often tag their videos with unrelated but trending hashtags. We should avoid this. Some relevant hashtags for us might include: #BabyLanguage #psych #ScienceTikTok #Research #LanguageDevelopment #LanguageFact #BrainScience #BabiesOfTikTok #ParentTok (but feel free to brainstorm more relevant or specific ones!)

• Mixed caps (capitalizing the first letter to separate words) in hashtags is helpful for people who use screen readers!