With TikTok’s entrance into the mainstream, a new market for third-party apps and services has sprung up to meet demand. With many businesses offering products like auto-engagers, fake followers, and TikTok growth services, it can be hard to figure out which products are legit.
What’s more, even if a specific product is legitimate, it can be even harder to determine whether it’s worth the time and money to use it.
Here, we’re going to help you navigate this new third-party market, especially as it relates to TikTok auto likes. We’ll give you the lowdown on what auto likes are, whether they’re useful, and whether they’re safe.
What Are TikTok Auto Likes?
TikTok auto likes are likes made automatically by bots on TikTok content. Unlike normal likes, they are not made by humans. It’s essentially social media engagement on autopilot.
But what exactly does that mean? And how does it work?
There are two variations. In both cases, the first step is to sign up and pay for an auto like product.
In the first variation, you give the auto like service your TikTok login information, it logs into your account, and makes likes on other people’s content on your behalf.
And In the second variation, you give the service your TikTok handle, and it sends its army of bots out to like your content.
No matter which way you cut it, the likes are not genuine, and the tactic is somewhat deceptive.
However, buying likes for your own videos is a bit more deceptive overall – people have come to expect a few bots to like their content every now and then, so TikTokers tend to take every individual like with a grain of salt.
But very few people are going to verify whether the likes on someone else’s video are real, so it’s unfortunately very easy to deceive people by buying huge amounts of likes for your own videos to make them think your account is much more popular than it is.
TikTok Auto Like Tools (Are They Worth It?)
If you do a Google search for “TikTok auto like,” you’ll find dozens of products that promise to provide you with instant likes for your TikTok videos along with a few tools that will allow you to automatically like other people’s content.
Some examples include FireLiker, FeedPixel, IceLiker, TikTokLiker.us, and Instafollowers. For the most part, these services are all the same: you give the service your TikTok username, and you receive likes from it. Simple.
But is it worth it to do so?
Currently, TikTok auto likes are not against TikTok’s terms of service, so you’re not violating any rules by using them. However, you are violating the trust of your viewers when you use fake engagement, and that can often be a much steeper price to pay than the money you’d pay to get the likes in the first place.
Fake likes are viewed as a deceptive and shady marketing tactic. While it can help you in the short term by making your company look more popular than it is, if people discover that your likes are fake (and they probably will eventually), it can irreparably harm your brand’s image.
If you’re using an auto liker to engage with other people’s content, you need to be aware that you’re trying to fool those users into thinking that you have actually liked their content – essentially lying to them.
What’s more: since you don’t control what content gets liked, you risk having your account like racist, sexist, or other problematic content, which is not only problematic because of supporting that content, but it could also be detrimental to your brand image.
Are They Safe?
As far as safety goes, it’s hard to verify how safe any of these products are. TikTok is fairly new, and TikTok auto like products are even newer, so there isn’t much history to go off. Antivirus tools (Avast in particular), give only a few products a green checkmark shield, while most have either a grey “?”, a yellow “x” shield, or a red “x” shield.
Overall, you need to be careful when using TikTok auto likes, especially if you are planning to give out your account’s login information. Always keep in mind that TikTok auto likes are designed to be dishonest, so many of the companies are dishonest and unethical themselves.
However, there are without a doubt some very honest and upstanding companies that simply don’t view auto likes as dishonest and are trying their hardest to offer a great product to their customers.
Why Do People Use TikTok AutoLikes
People use auto likes for two reasons.
- To make people think they are more popular than they are (social proof).
- To engage with other TikTokers in hopes of gaining more likes and follows of their own.
The first scenario is the easiest to grasp. If your video has 10 likes, the average TikToker might very well see it doesn’t have many likes and move past it, assuming that it must not be good if so few people have liked it.
However, if they see a video with 200,000 likes, they may be curious to check out what all the fuss is about.
The second scenario is slightly more in-depth. In short, when someone likes a TikTok video, the creator typically receives a notification. Generally, creators are interested in who likes their content, so they’ll check out the profiles of the people that like their videos.
When they do that, there’s a chance they’ll like your content, and give you a follow.
So, the logic follows that if every like you make on a video gives you a chance of getting a follow back, you should like as much content as you possibly can. Hence auto likes, which can surpass the liking capacity of a human – instead of liking 20 videos a day, an auto liker could theoretically like 200,000.
But there are issues with this. First off, if you like too many videos, TikTok may become suspicious of your account, even if doing so isn’t explicitly against the terms of service.
Second, the creators of the videos you like could catch on that you’re using an auto liker if your account isn’t in the same niche, and then specifically not follow you even though they may have otherwise.
Overall, if auto likes work, they help boost profile visibility and improve the ranking of your videos. But there are also many ways that using auto like tools can go wrong, which means there is a very big risk.
Other TikTok Strategies To Boost Engagement
Given the problems that TikTok auto likes have, it’s better to try other strategies to boost engagement. Here are a few other ways you should consider.
Work With TikTok Influencers
Like Instagram, TikTok provides a great platform for influencers.
To effectively use TikTok as a marketing channel, it’s essential that you work with influencers when appropriate. That means partnering with influencers to create content that will promote your brand to their adoring followers.
You can use a TikTok user search tool like Influence Grid to find influencers that will be a good fit for your brand. Influence Grid shows stats about top influencers including their country, number of followers, average views per video, average likes per video, and their engagement rate.
Create Engaging Content
The best way to grow your following and engagement on TikTok is to create content that people will genuinely want to follow and engage with.
If you’re not getting the results you want, try creating content that has specific engagement CTAs (calls to action). For example, try making a video in which you ask an open ended question, create a quiz where viewers can submit answers, or host a poll.
Cross-Promote Your Videos
If you already have a following on other social media channels, you can leverage it to bring some of your current followers over to TikTok.
Doing so is typically pretty easy: just link to your TikTok videos on your other social media accounts.
There are some circumstances where you won’t want to do this, however. For example, if your TikTok content is very different from your content on other social media platforms, you may want to keep them separate.
Key Takeaways
Overall, other strategies like partnering with influencers, creating engaging content, and cross-promoting your videos are more conducive to long term and sustainable growth than using TikTok auto likes.
Unfortunately, TikTok auto likes bring a lot of risks with them, and the pay off typically isn’t very good.
Like most things, success on TikTok takes a lot of concerted effort, and there’s no easy way to do it.
