I have been publishing my cartoons on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for about two months. Here is what I learned so far.
I began with TikTok, where, with a real purpose in mind, I published single-panel gag cartoons.
The first week after publishing around 100 cartoons that featured snowmen and Martians, several of them got more than 500 views. Some got more than 700 views, and some surpassed 900 views.
Which video would be the first to make the 1k Club? The 1k Club, in case you are wondering, is a club I created. Yes, 1k is modest.
Things looked pretty promising. I thought I was off to a good start—that is until a family member went on TikTok and watched some of my cartoons. The cartoons they liked, but the background music, they questioned.
Well, although the views on some of my posts surpassed 500, I could not live with the background music. It was not just the wrong music. It was awful! It was rap—with the F-word repeated like a parrot. It was the background music to one of my most-viewed posts Shut Up, or I’ll Shoot.
I deleted took the video immediately.
I began to wonder then worry. I went through the first dozen or so posts. Sure enough, the music in the background of most of them were not only the wrong music but bad. I was not aware of it, but if you do not choose the music for you posts, TikTok will chose it for you.
Bad idea.
Of all the options you have editing your TikTok post after you have published them, oddly enough, changing the music is not one of them. Ugh.
I had no choice. I took the posts down. It costs me thousands of views. I re-posted them. The results, the views, were totally different. The re-posts could not seem to break 300 views. I wonder: Had these posts gotten a lot of views because of the bad music? Gosh, I hope not.
Since then, I have yet to surpass 300 views on even new posts—but at least the background music that I had chosen is the right fit—or at least the most fitting. I believe for my cartons, New Orleans jazz fits best.
I just could not live with 300 views or less, so I decided to start over. I deleted my TikTok account and starting a new one. The followers I had, gone.
Once realized that, I decided to live with what I had done, and before it was too late, 30 days, I reactivated my account. TikTok welcomed me back with sarcasm.
I’m wondering if TikTok just has just has to recover from all the drastic changes I made to my account in such a short time. Will it be months before I start to see some real growth again in view? We will see.
I’m learning, of course, that TikTok, a short video-based platform, is not the greatest platform for still-life, one-panel cartoons. It does not make sense to add a caption to a gag cartoons. They already have captions.
What is more suitable, however, for one-panel gag cartoons is Instagram.
I did have an Instagram account but it was static. I had not posted on it for years.
So, I decided to post gag cartoons on Instagram.
For weeks, I had not seen any real results on Instagram. None of my cartoons got more than 500 views. I even posted animated gag cartoons. Same results.
Then I had what I call a small breakthrough.
I created a cartoon called No Trespassing, which I published on Instagram.
About three days after I posted the animated version of the video, I noticed it jumped in views! Would it be the first video to make the 1k Club? I wanted to be at home, in my office, to witness it.
Well, I could not wait.
We were in Sam’s Club at the Customer Service desk of all places when it happened. I could not resist it. I checked my phone.
No Trespassing hit 1,000 views!
Well, the gag cartoon has been up on Instagram for about a week now. It has surpassed 1,500 views.
I posted another cartoon: Be Careful What You Moon. In just a couple of days, that cartoon surpassed 2,500 views.
I published a third cartoon: Shut Up, or I’ll Shoot. It surpassed 1,600 views in just one day!
I am almost convinced that Instagram is the best platform for one-panel gag cartoons. What I am not convinced of is that TikTok is not suitable for these cartoons.
I believe my rough start to TikTok, publishing cartoons then deleting them, has caused a set back in the TikTok algorithm.
In my opinion, though TikTok might be the best platform for one-panel animated cartoons. I create them through Grok, which is a topic for another post.
Some cartoons, I am learning, are more suitable for TikTok, and some are more suitable for Instagram. Some cartoons work better as still single-panel gag cartoons, and some work better for single-panel animated gag cartoons. One what platform, I do not know for sure. For how long, I do not know.
YouTube, I guess, is the all-in-one platform for still-life one-panel gag cartoons and animated ones. However, YouTube is showing the slowest growth in views per post.
As a cartoonist on social media, I will stay the course and views, I hope, will improve once the algorithm gets use to me. The one thing you should not do is throw the algorithm off.
I am hoping I have just learned the hard way about best practices posting cartoons to social media and eventually my cartoons will get views.