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What do you do with videos that don’t perform well on TikTok?
Posted by on October 11, 2025 at 5:40 amI started posting on TikTok about three months ago, and I’m up to almost 6,000 followers now. In the beginning, I didn’t care much about performance, I was just experimenting and having fun. But now that I’ve grown a bit, I’ve started paying more attention to my analytics… maybe too much attention.
Every time I post, I give it about 45 minutes to see how it’s doing. If it’s not hitting my usual benchmark, I start getting anxious and end up privating the video.
I’m curious, how do you all handle it when a video doesn’t do well? Do you leave it up, delete it, or private it? How do you keep from letting the numbers get to you?
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1 Reply
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I think post it as shorts or insta reels
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Definitely give it more than 45 minutes! Most of my videos start seeing traction hours later. I never delete, I will private it if it’s like an embarrassingly low number for how many followers I have. For example if I have 100k followers and a video is under 500 views after a while I will private it but a lot of times I leave it up because everyone has weird view days.
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Curious what your typical benchmark is for those 45 minutes—are you tracking watch time % or just views? I’d echo giving it way more time; TikTok’s FYP distribution often has secondary waves 6-12 hours post-publish, especially if early completions were strong but raw reach was soft. One angle: if you’re consistently privating underperformers, you might be pulling content before the algorithm finishes testing it with micro-niches, which can actually train your account profile narrower over time. Have you noticed any pattern in which videos recover late vs stay flat? That can reveal whether it’s hook failure (dies fast) vs topic mismatch (never finds audience).
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privating after 45 minutes? that’s odd. don’t do that. 45 minutes is not enough time. give it 5 days, at least.
honestly I’ve never removed a video due to performance. it doesn’t matter at all. it doesn’t affect your account in any way. just leave your videos up, no one cares. I have 83k followers and the view count really jumps around. it’ll go from 2m on a video to 3k on the next to 40k on the next, etc. it goes up and down.
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Don’t delete. Private it and iterate. I give each post 24-48h before judging, then recut a stronger 1-2s hook and repost.
Batch-test 3-5 variants with new opens, a better first frame/thumbnail, and a tighter caption at different times.
When you treat it as a system, the anxiety drops because every miss turns into data.
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