🛑Posting with an API may have killed my TIKTOK organic reach
Welcome IndieHackers, SoloDevs, App creators, Vibe coders...
I have an app, doing organic, with validated formats, it was working good with manually posting but I wanted to scale it. So, I Started posting 4x a day on 4 different accounts.
At first, on paper, the maths looked great, this was 1k views (approx°) per video so per day it's like 1000*4*4 = 16k views (On 4 accounts)
But, I noticed I hit the 1000 views wall. All videos posted with API (not tiktok official API) were stucked.
Meanwhile, seeing my competitors having 50k views with similar content was blowing me up.
So I switched back to manual posting.
But the accounts were still capped.
With time, I learned that tiktok can know if you post with API (Of course ajaj!)
But..
My accounts were still stucked at 1000 Views even if I tried validated content from my competitors.
Unfortunately I was unable to remove this barrier.
Still stuck at 1000 Views, watching my competitors grinding views STONKS.
My final conclusion :
I think the combination of:
- Unofficial API posting
- Scaling too fast
- Repeated posting patterns
- Too much automation
sent bad signals to TikTok.
I'm sure it's not a matter of content. I'm just soft-shadowbanned.
Lesson learned:
Don’t try to automate TikTok organic at 100% too early.
- Scale slowly.
- Keep human behavior (with warm up etc..)
- Avoid unofficial posting tools.
- And don’t let automation destroy what was already working (Scale it manually with not hardcoded texts).
PS : I would like to say to my past self to don't try to automatize the process at 100%.
My next post will be about the optimized app I made and use each day to grow my organic.
Repost if this helps you avoid the same mistake.