Do you sincerely enjoy sharing parts of your life with your TikTok audience, or do you carefully preserve your privacy? This type of thing can vary quite a lot from one creator to another, and where you fall on the spectrum is entirely up to you. The key is to be aware of how much (or how little) you’d prefer to share. For some people, the priority is to be totally authentic; in fact, their entire brand could be built on it. For others, privacy is something they value, so they just don’t get into personal details in their videos.
However, there’s another part of the equation that has to be considered: how the audience will respond. They could be enthusiastic to know more about their favorite creator, or they could be respectful of boundaries. Or, they could get entitled about wanting to know even more personal details, or get angry that the creator is misrepresenting themselves. In some cases, TikTok creators have to walk a fine line between connecting with their audience, and preserving their privacy. So what’s the best approach? This will ultimately be up to your own preferences, but considering the pros and cons of each option should help you make up your mind.
Opening up to your followers: pros
- It can help foster a stronger connection between you and your fans. If you’re trying to cultivate a loyal, trusting fanbase, some level of personal sharing is probably necessary.
- It can feel relieving to be able to vent to your audience. A lot of TikTok creators don’t just make planned videos; they also post quick updates when something bad happened that they need to get off their chest.
- It can lead to faster growth, since highly connected and engaged followings tend to grow more quickly.
Opening up to your followers: cons
- It can lead to a sense of entitlement from your fans – give them an inch, and they’ll ask for a mile. They might start responding poorly if you mention a situation that you don’t want to share the details of, or if you exclude certain parts of your life from them.
- It can contribute to stress and burnout, since you could feel pressured to share everything that happens in your life. When TikTok creators don’t enforce a healthy work-life balance – including setting boundaries regarding their privacy – that’s a recipe for rapid burnout.
- It can cause you to rely on your following for advice and feedback more than your real-life friends. It’s common for creators to read comments on each video, and those comments are often full of opinions, criticisms (constructive and otherwise), and other types of feedback. Some creators even specifically ask for advice from their followers. This is a great way to raise engagement rates, but it can also cause you to rely more on strangers, and less on real-world friends.
Keeping your privacy: pros
- It can preserve your peace of mind to some extent. If you’re the type of person who hates feeling like they’ve overshared, this will help keep stress levels to a minimum.
- It can help you avoid controversy and criticism. When TikTok creators share a ton of personal details online, they’re essentially opening themselves up to be judged by their followers. The best-case scenario is that nobody takes issue with them, but this doesn’t always happen. If you don’t share those details in the first place, though, you won’t have to be judged by the court of public opinion.
- It can put the focus on your content instead of on you. While some types of TikTok accounts are all about the creator’s personality, others are more informational. Depending on the niche you’re in, keeping your private life out of your videos could actually make more sense from a content creation standpoint.
Keeping your privacy: cons
- It could cause your following to grow more slowly. This varies from one account to the next, but there’s no denying that engagement is better when the audience feels connected to the TikTok creator. If you can’t find other ways of connecting with your followers, you might want to consider purchasing followers or likes from TikCeleb to keep your account growing.
- It could cause pointless speculation or gossip. If you don’t set the record straight from the beginning, this opens up the possibility of people telling tall tales about you. It may come to nothing, or it could turn into a full-blown controversy; usually, nothing serious happens. Even so, it could be stressful to see people gossiping about you, knowing that you’d have to sacrifice your privacy in order to clear things up.
- It could spark accusations of deception. Social media is an unpredictable animal at times, and a lot of TikTok followers equate oversharing with authenticity. By the same token, withholding personal information could be seen as inauthentic or deceptive. Even if you’ve been completely honest with your followers, they might not respond well when you set boundaries regarding private information.
What if you’re just trying to keep everyone happy?
If you don’t really care how much you share with your audience, then you don’t necessarily have to puzzle over this question too much. However, don’t forget that your followers probably have certain expectations too. If you feel strongly on the subject, you should definitely go with your gut rather than accommodating a bunch of strangers on the internet (even if they’re your fans). If you don’t have a preference one way or the other, though, then maybe you could let your following have some say in the matter.
Do they seem interested in getting to know you better? If so, you could make a Q and A video, or a video describing ten facts about yourself. If not, you can just leave things the way they are. Either way, there’s no doubt that navigating this issue can be tricky at times. Just make sure you respect your own preferences, while also considering what your fans want; when you find the right balance, that’s when the magic happens!