How To Prepare Your Content For TikTok
Unless you’ve accepted your Principal Skinner status as I have, you likely already know that any type of online video content also needs to include content tailored to TikTok and Instagram audiences. So in this blog post, we’re going to discuss how to prepare your live streaming content for TikTok audiences, how to make it easy to record that content, and how to edit it!
Structuring Your Content For TikTok
To make this process painless you’ll need to do a bit of prep work for your live stream. Basically, you’ll want to identify or plan moments in your stream that can work as short clips. You’ll want to consider these organic and planned moments.
Organic moments are when anything naturally happens during your stream. This can be significant donations, unexpected interactions, or conversations, like getting a sandwich thrown at you on stream.
The planned moments are parts of your stream you design to elicit a response or go viral. This could be giving yourself a set of challenges to complete, reacting to specific videos, or doing a news recap of the day. Basically, make a set time for your hot takes or blowups, so you know when you will be recording something for socials.
Recording Content for TikTok
Now that you have the moments planned, all you need to do is record them in the easiest way possible to edit. XSplit Broadcaster lets you set up different recording profiles. So you can have a profile for recording your raw footage in high quality and another profile pre-configured for your social media sites.
All you need to do is create a frame that fits the resolution of the sites you plan to post the most. So if you’ll be creating TikTok and Instagram story content, you just need to put in the graphic that gives guidelines for 9:16 content. Then add the scene as a source and put it in your live scene with your logo and text source for your stream details for a simple setup.
Or you can reconfigure your sources to better fit the 9:16 layout like your camera and video source. Just make sure you watermark your content in some way because TikTok is notorious for people using other people’s content.
Now if you have the processing power and hard drive space, you can keep your recordings active at all times, however, I recommend setting up a hotkey for your social media recording so you can activate them at will. Additionally, if you had an unexpected moment happen, you can use the replay source as a method of recording those moments and saving yourself some time in the edit. Finally, be sure to enable multi-track audio recording so you can save yourself a lot of headaches in post.
Post Production
Alright, if you’ve followed the steps in the video, post-production should be a breeze or not even needed at all! Basically, you’ll just need to edit your clips and export them in the proper resolution. If you played any music and used multitrack audio, it should be easy to remove this so you don’t get hit by the DMCA demon.
So that’s all it takes to set up a workflow to quickly create social media content from your live stream to TikTok or Instagram. While this is a bit of a shotgun approach to promoting yourself, the reality is, when you’re building your name, you need to find any way possible to get people’s eyes on you and TikTok especially has a growing audience that’s looking for new content and an algorithm that rewards quantity and quality can help here as well. If you have any questions about this, be sure to let me know in the comments.