From the editor:

This blog is part three of a four-part TikTok exposé brought to you by FearWorm in conjunction with our client Fear Factory SLC. Chris Strebel, their Media Director, has had wonderful success with this new, exciting social platform. FearWorm is proud to bring this information to our industry.

If you missed Part 2, read it here first.

Take it away, Chris! 

Fear Factory 2019 Season 

Nearing the end of the 2018 season we noticed several kids talking about TikTok and even some of the younger staff talking about it as well, remember Generation Z ages 12-26? Curious, we asked if we could see the app and knew this was something we wanted/needed to add for the 2019 season because they are our target audience. 

We started with a goal of 2,000 followers as we quickly gained traction; we increased that goal to 30,000 followers. We were able to surpass that goal to 46,000 by the end of our season.

Your goal might be different based on time and investment in a new social media platform. Whatever your goal is, you’ll need to be posting content, and following those hashtags, there are new ones each day, and even if it has passed, you can go back and revisit it and post your content. Just remember it’s better to stay current and ahead of the trend than to fall behind. 

As a Haunted Attraction, we have a unique environment we can highlight:

• The makeup as it’s applied to a character
• Different rooms within your Haunt
• Your huge crowds ‘show off your popularity.’
• Behind the scenes 
• Promo videos
• Other events you attend/or put on
• Scares
• Engagements/soldier welcome homes
• Character/makeup artists TikTok accounts that you can share to your profile
• The possibilities are endless. 

At Fear Factory SLC, we have a team of Actors, Customer Service, and Makeup Artist that we call our ‘Street Team.’ These are some of our most dedicated staff members over the years. Our team is willing and ready to create videos with enough advance notice. Start looking among your staff whom you know are your most dedicated and reliable staff and have them help in the creation of your TikTok videos, but also keep watching the new people who join you. They might have a good idea or a character you may highlight.

Concepts and Creative

I’d like to showcase a few different videos that went viral for us at Fear Factory SLC Haunted House during the 2019 season. Our first viral video was something very relatable: putting on your first eye contact lenses.

Many of us struggled with them at the start; some never struggled. We were getting ready for the show, and I happened to come out and see an actor struggling with his contacts. I quickly got out the only thing I had to record at the time, which was my phone. I opened my camera app and recorded it as this beautiful struggle went down. 

After I shot this, I began to plot and think about each shot that I had. Carefully watching each segment since each shot was in the moment, I wanted to make sure it told the story of someone struggling, family help, and family teasing. This video highlighted two things behind the scenes and a relatable struggle. I also followed and watched particular hashtags that were; being used currently and hashtags that related to my content.

You can see here how this video performed by looking at our analytics. You can see that 88% of our views came directly from the For You page. 

Our next video is also our most-watched/liked – Killing Karen is bad was the second version of the original that we posted. Our first video was the original one that TikTok flagged as breaking their community standards. 

Here, you can see again that 89% of our traffic came directly from the For You page. 

 Finally, this last video is our first viral international and most commented video to date. We shot this as a Vampire Friendsgiving Feast video. It had maybe 6,000 views, which was great. On December 06th, this video found itself in front of the people of Indonesia. How cool is that! 

Finally, here you can see that 97% of our views came from the For You page, But if you notice in my Audience Territories that 78% of my views came from Indonesia. I would say over 1.7 million of those views came from Indonesia. Don’t worry. Fear Factory SLC will create more Vampire content for you guys to watch in 2020.