Metaphor time! When is a fully stocked fridge a bad thing? If you’re not checking expiration dates, the answer is always. We’ve all forgotten a takeout container or had a potato go a little wild occasionally, but ultimately, waste is waste, toxins are toxins, and bleach is essential.
Your TikTok is the same.
Sure, it’s not a perfect analogy; no one’s expecting you to go back through all your content, deleting everything that shows your babyface and regrettable lighting choices. You have to give the latecomers something to stalk through. But, maintaining freshness with your incoming content is a high priority. Audiences love consistency, but there’s a thick line between giving the people what they want and being a one-trick pony.
You don’t want to be the ‘ripped my pants’ guy everyone gets tired of. So, how do you go about keeping your content relevant and refreshing at the same time? It can be done, but as usual, there are some caveats to establish first.
None of this counts if you’re just starting on TikTok.
That’s right, greenhorns to the back, this isn’t for you. If you’re still in the effing around and finding out what works stage of your content creator career, this is something for you to bookmark for a little later on. It’s never fun to hear, “You’ll understand when you’re older,” but it is fun to SAY, and it is also very true in these tidbits.
We’ve got other articles for you to get into and start building from, so get going, and we’ll meet you back here when you’re ready. Nothing that follows is based on algorithm divination or developing rules, so this advice will keep unless TikTok pivots entirely to delivering curated snack boxes.
Fresh Squeezed Content
Let’s answer the biggest question first: What IS freshness?
Is “fresh” a buzzword like edgy or a meaningless managerial term that means “I want to have input without needing to discern a real difference?” Yes!
But also, it’s a real thing.
For our purposes, freshness brings a quality of novelty to your content that’s still grounded in your audience’s interests and your platform’s aims. Let’s go back to food for a minute. Picture a delicious salad. (If your idea of a good salad is a BLT, that’s fine too; just stay in the analogy.) The lettuce itself doesn’t need to be polka-dotted. Or new car scented. It just needs to be recently picked.
Fresh content means you’re giving your audience something new without giving them something wholly reinvented. It’s like the difference between whitening your teeth and replacing them with surgically implanted pothos vines. One’s a nice way to revive a smile after tannin-saturated decades of crunching through coffee grounds and brushing with sweet tea. The other is only going to attract a very…particular audience.
Freshness stays rooted (still thinking of the pothos gums, sorry) in your analytics and interests.
Here’s what to consider.
What have I seen work?
What do your numbers and analytics tell you you need to keep doing as a base? If your numbers say your duets are doing amazing, how do you keep those coming? If your comedy content is killing it, where and how will you develop new bits? Ultimately, this is you asking, “What does my audience want to keep seeing takes on?” and if you’ve been managing (or listening to your managers) the right way, you’ll have the engagement tracked accordingly, and this won’t be a tricky question to answer.
What do I want to keep doing?
This isn’t always a great idea for making money — and it hurts to admit it. But there are always creators out there who do ONE one-off, it takes off, and now suddenly they’re That Guy, even if they never wanted to be. If there’s content you don’t mind sticking with, there’s no reason to dump the lucrative and good for the potential perfect.
If you’re genuinely unhappy being pulled in a certain direction, there’s no need to become what you hate — especially because “Just until XYZ gets paid off” has a funny way of becoming “Until I die.” Make sure you can at least live with any new directions, riffs, or takes if they take off. Don’t set yourself up for needing to nuke everything and start from scratch again.
Why is freshness important? If the keyword is consistency, if niches lead to riches, then what’s the point in stepping outside of a good thing?
Well, remember the upsetting and horrible metaphor from a few paragraphs ago? You’re not going for reinvention; you’re going for retention!
Stay with us on this one — because getting new eyeballs is not an option. What you’re chasing here is both continued interest and new watchers. Fresher content rewards your Day Ones’ attention with continued or heightened quality. Meanwhile, that same dedication will attract soon-to-be fans who aren’t interested in slipping on slop.
The ‘stickiness’ of your content, trapping the old and attracting the new, sundew-style, is key to present and future monetization. Once you’re making a chunk, or even the entirety of your living, from your content, you don’t have a hobby anymore (unless you’re already independently wealthy); you have a job.
If your TikTok is an essential spoke of your marketing wheel as a company, it’s been a part of your job to ensure that glue trap keeps its tack!
And there’s more than just your immediate checking account at stake here. Thinking long term, you’ll never keep your integrity as a creator by just churning out without paying attention. Set your sights on the targets created by your analytics and shoot those suckers down. You can only continue to improve, so investing the time isn’t an opportunity you can miss.
How to Stay Fresh
With all that said, how do you attain Freshness™?
Sharpen the look and feel of your videos
Unfortunately, it’s not always true that “The newer, the better,” where tech is concerned. We’re reaching a point of diminishing returns on newer products, and it’s taking the starch out of all the beards at the gizmo conventions.
Even so, there’s no mistaking high quality with picture and sound. Continue investing in quality equipment while keeping abreast of what the geeks say about the latest and greatest. Ensure you’re also maintaining what you already have — steaming your green screens straight, taking the scuffs off your backdrops, oiling what squeaks, taping what leaks, and pop-filtering what hisses.
Once you know that you can capture it adequately, take more time to learn about what looks and sounds the best. Get into color and music theory — learn what types of background music go best with what kind of content, do your colors, and learn whether you’re autumn or spring. It’s all part of keeping video quality high, so stay sharp! Or flat.
Whatever the mood for your content demands.
Consider paying professional camera people, sound designers, asset designers, and editors at a certain point of success. Being a jack of all trades is great; it raises your value as a creator and saves money. But getting that freshness means shelling out for those professionals once you get to a point where you can.
Don’t think of it as an admission of weakness or write it off as an unneeded cook in the kitchen. Think of it as an opportunity to learn from seasoned professionals with experience and focus you can use to level up your content even more.
Sharpen your captions
Last note — a small, big one — stop using auto-captions. Or at least stop using them exclusively.
It’s great that you want to be inclusive for people who are hard of hearing and the Too Polite to blast TikTok Whilst in Public Sans Headphones communities, but it’s distracting, cringey, and just unnecessary to have incorrect subtitling in your videos.
If you truly don’t care that your audience is hearing “craftily” and reading “crap lilly” at the same time (or just reading and getting very confused)…then thanks for checking us out as opposed to Instagram or the back of the shampoo bottle! But as far as getting things freshened up goes, this one’s an easy mark to hit: ensure any captions you upload are accurate.
That’s all for tips about the raw AV side of things. What can you do to better spruce up the content you offer?
What about trends?
Don’t follow trends; follow developments. A trend is something like the dog filter of yore or the “Hear Me Out…” cakes. Developments are happening in your world, like whatever fresh-out-of-hell things are in the news or the emergence of sexy new automation advancements.
None of this is to say you need to become a Chiron for current events. You will want to work around what’s going on in whatever way fits best. You don’t need to mention anything explicitly, implicitly, or subliminally (give it time) — just keep current events in mind, pay attention to how your audience is talking about them, and tailor your content accordingly.
That might mean a compilation of “Times my cat interrupted my streaming” to distract from the ocean burning down, or a “Pieces of cake I’d rather have as my city alderman” in response to your city’s alderman burning down your local ocean. What your audience wants and what you need will decide!
Just bring it all back to you, what your audience loves about you, and what you want to keep giving them in return.
Okay, but Trends Though…
Well, they’re not evil. Like anything that gets popular, there’s never necessarily one reason; they happen, and we cycle through them. You’re not wrong for wanting to jump on board, especially if you can be a bit of a front-runner.
There are just a couple of things to keep in mind.
Keep it simple
You don’t have to wallpaper your whole presence with the trend. Don’t make whatever the 2025 version of duck facing is your entire TikTok persona for the next month; just pepper in enough to add a flash in the pan because…
Don’t force it
Don’t feel the need to twist into trends that don’t suit your content. Trends come and go, and it’s okay to let them pass you by if they don’t gel because pass by they will. Save your time and energy, and focus on what you’ve niched down into.
Do you want to riff on, mock, or twist a trend to suit you instead? Go for it. If snark suits your brand, there are ways to riff: subversions, anti-memes, purposefully bad execution for a laugh, etc.
So long as it all goes back to what your audience wants from you, shake that trend crouton onto your content salad.
Don’t Hate, Collaborate!
It’s dangerous to go alone; collaborating with like minds and like channels is a great way to inject some extra vitality into your presence. But you can’t just spam the comments waiting for the right fit to notice you.
Here’s how to find the right collabs.
What to pay attention to
Don’t just agree to collab with anyone who asks, no matter how big of a deal they are. Here’s what to check before you jump into any agreements.
- Brand: Do they do brand collabs in the first place? If not, do you know how you plan to convince them otherwise without catching a block? Do you have mutual followers or at least a mutual interest amongst followers (so not a dog leash company and someone who specializes in beer yoga, you know)?
- FAQ: Powerful presences require powerful protections. One of the best ways to keep illiterate randos from wasting your time is putting up a fence detailing how exactly to break the barrier. It could be as simple as “Use this email instead of this one” or as complex as “Solve for y in the subject line.” Either way, read it, respect it, and then make your move.
- Followthrough: It’s one of life’s cruel jokes that you can be popular and also bad at what you do. Just ask the makers of that one thing you really hate! If you haven’t followed your potential collaborator for long, ensure they’re known for making good on their word. If you’re seeing a lot of “Hey, sorry guys…” videos surrounding new topics, giveaways, and so on, keep it moving.
And while you’re moving, consider what you’re doing outside of your craft.
What else should you talk about to keep things fresh?
You can break down your platform on TikTok or any other app as a conversation between you and your audience. So, what do you do to make your conversations more interesting?
You talk about cool new things you’ve done, what you’ve learned, perspectives you’ve gained, articles you’ve read — whatever you’ve been doing as personal enrichment. Experiment with new things in your actual outside life, and you’ll have more interesting conversations with your viewers!
Stay Fresh, Friends
No matter what you might think of how much free time you do or don’t have, in terms of returns on your career investments, getting out there and doing something new/weird/fun/educational always grants a ratio in your favor.
And if you need to cut hours from elsewhere in your social media management, we might know a way.
