How do you get a video to reach a huge audience on TikTok? Two videos we filmed and posted for Lincolnshire Showground have gone viral – one with 137k views, another with 217k views.
Just to put that into perspective, a video with more than 100,000 views is considered ‘viral’ while the average video posted from a business account is said to reach around 20,000 views (but you’re not alone if you’re struggling to reach 1,000).
So why did these videos resonate so well with the TikTok audience, and why should marketers be interested in making content go viral?
Social media for Lincolnshire Show
To help me explain, I’ll fill you in on the background.
For the last two years, we’ve been running the PR and social media for the Lincolnshire Show – Lincolnshire’s biggest annual event, where around 60,000 people come to celebrate all things Lincolnshire, with a particular focus on food, farming and country life.
As well as encouraging ticket sales, one of our goals was to increase awareness among younger people, which is why we included TikTok in our marketing strategy.
By a long way, TikTok is the most popular social media platform for people aged 18-24, who form the largest demographic on TikTok. The platform has become a firm favourite for Gen Z and, whatever your age, it’s among the most used social media in the UK.
However, when we started promoting the Show back in 2024, our client’s TikTok profile had only just been set up, so we prioritised the other platforms to have a greater immediate impact – but we cross-posted this content on TikTok to help grow the new channel.
TikTok Rule Number 1: Nothing too fancy
Despite its small number of followers, we had some early success in the month before the Show, with a video showing the Showground’s CEO on location and describing some of the highlights, cut with some basic branded graphics. This reached 11k views – making this the Showground’s first video that performed better on TikTok than it did on Instagram and Facebook.
So why did this post do better than the others? It’s because it was simple, human and direct – perfect for TikTok.
Most people associate TikTok with choreographed dances or lip syncing, but TikTok is really about the human connection – ordinary people communicating directly with you, the user, as if you were right in front of them. Content is short-form (ideally under a minute) and videos do best when they look real.
By that, I mean that it should look like the sort of thing you or I are used to seeing, making or sharing on a daily basis as regular social media users. Mobile phone footage and pieces to camera are an absolute mainstay on the platform, and content absolutely has to be shot in portrait. Production values can help to make a video pop, but you cannot go too far by making things look unreal, inauthentic or too professional. For content to do well on TikTok, it has to look genuine – and this is why this video did so well.
TikTok Trick Number 2: Show them something new
It might feel like it, but you don’t just watch any old nonsense on social media – you watch things that give you something in return for your time, whether that’s something captivating, interesting, entertaining or educational (yes, really).
Letting people see things that do all of these will help them keep watching, and by the simple act of watching, they’re helping your video go further.
During the Show itself, we were regularly producing video content for TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, with videos showing different elements of the Show. The idea was to share an experience, bringing you something you might never have seen before and letting you see and hear what it’s like to be at Lincolnshire Show.
Shot on mobile, simply edited and with minimal graphics and basic production, the videos looked good but authentic, showing eye-catching, interesting actions, sequences and scenes including a farrier hammering in his forge, livestock being groomed, a brass band, some traditional fairground rides, some cows being judged and a drone shot of the Showground site. Transitions were basic and graphics were minimal – and we found that one-shot videos did best.
Without needing any supporting information or setup, these let people get a feel for what the Show is all about and experience it through their smartphones.
Together, these reached 30k views, which was fine – but then came our first tug of war video, which reached 30k views all by itself…
TikTok Trick Number 3: Put on a show
To be honest, I caught this video by chance. I was out on my lunch break, I’d just wolfed down a hot dog when I walked past this tug of war tournament and pointed my camera at it while holding a can of coke.
With Young Farmers Clubs from across the local area and across the country competing, the event is loud, dramatic, impressive and, for most people, it’s unusual and impressive to see.
It was only when I stopped filming and watched the footage back that I realised how captivating it was: The bright colours, the high-action movements, the sound (TikTok has sound on by default), and the fact that it’s 52 seconds of high drama with a payoff at the end. You can’t not watch it, and you’ll probably watch it a few times over and see something new.
I popped it onto each social media channel and it proved an instant hit that kept growing in popularity in the days after the show finished. But it was TikTok where it really connected.
TikTok Trick Number 4: Rinse and repeat
A good thing to remember with TikTok is that lightning often strikes twice. What worked before can definitely work again – and better.
In fact, many successful TikTok users post loads of near-identical videos that follow a set formula. This is clever because users might see a video once and then remember it when they see another just like it in their For You Page. They’ll then look out for others like it and the TikTok algorithm remembers that. You can also mimic the style and even replicate the templates used by others to ride on the coattails of other popular or trending content, and that’s fine, so you shouldn’t let a lack of originality put you off when it comes to TikTok.
Knowing that the previous year’s tug of war worked well, I made sure I was ready for the same event in 2025 (and even got sunburn waiting in the perfect position to film it).
TikTok Trick Number 5: One video can support another
How can you get people who enjoy one of your videos to actively seek out your other videos? Sure, you can hope that the algorithm will eventually let you pop up again in their feed, but another way is to give users a reason to seek it out for themselves by visiting your profile or following you.
For this, you might want to turn your posts into a series which, while engaging on their own, are also distinctly labelled parts that offer the enticing promise that there’s more to see. Users might come across part one or part two and, knowing there’s more, they’ll visit your profile and seek it out or hit ‘follow’. This is something we managed to do with the 2025 tug of war.
Tug of war is played in two or three rounds, with the teams swapping sides until one team wins, so I filmed both rounds and posted them one after the other. (I could have been particularly cheeky and had a few videos in between them so users have to look around on the profile a bit more, but time constraints meant I had to crack on – maybe next time, eh?)
Labelling this was simple – with text on-screen and in the description saying ‘Round One’ or ‘Round Two’ and the first video showed the teams swapping sides for the next round to begin. That was enough to get one video supporting the other, and also supporting the main profile by encouraging clicks or follows. Again, the stats show this playing out – between them, the videos have prompted almost 400 people to follow the profile, with the Round One video having done so the most, despite having a lower reach.
TikTok Trick Number 6: Know your primary audience
Obviously, most people who visit the Lincolnshire Show live in Lincolnshire, and people in the area form the majority of the account’s followers, so they’re the people the organisation generally wants to target the most. We were also actively seeking to target younger people on TikTok to appeal to the next generation of visitors.
So, when you’re filming content at Lincolnshire Show and you’re presented with a tournament of Young Farmers Clubs, of course you’re going to film the Lincolnshire team…. And it also helped that they won both rounds against Derbyshire.
But as well as age and location that influenced the decision, it also helped that the round was of two women’s teams. Generally, TikTok has slightly more female users than male, and the same is true for the Showground’s followers, so the content had particular appeal to local, young women – especially since it showed a positive representation of women being strong, bold, boisterous, defying expectations and stereotypes.
The way that TikTok works is that it tracks how long it takes for a video to reach certain viewing milestones before deciding whether to push the content to a wider audience. That means that if you can appeal to your existing followers and your primary audience right away, TikTok will help you reach more users. Get their interest and reach the next threshold in time, and your video will be shared even more widely. In this instance, the video absolutely nailed the Showground’s audience straight away, and they helped to push it out more widely by engaging or even just by watching.
TikTok Trick Number 7: Collaboration
While all of these elements combined to make our Tug of War videos a success, it was also helped by the fact there’s a celebrity on the Derbyshire team.
Harriet Cowan is a contract farmer who appeared in Season 4 of Clarkson’s Farm. She has a very strong profile that’s well aligned with our target audience, so tagging her in – and having her followers do the same – helped it to reach even more users (in fact, 16% of people found the second video through a Harriet Cowan search query – slightly more than the number searching for Lincolnshire Show).
I can’t actually see if Harriet herself has liked it (her likes are private and she hasn’t commented) but by her very presence, she’s helped the video perform well – even though she’s not the focus of it.
Why a viral video is so good for marketing
You might watch the video and question its marketing value – after all, the only mention of the Lincolnshire Show is in the description and right at the end where a discreet logo appears.
But these numbers will surely convince you:
The three videos have reached a combined 385,000 views. That’s more than the number of people who read the Daily Telegraph or The Times, and we know that the videos were watched from start to finish 16,000 times, with 1,500 hours of total play time.
We can also see that the majority of viewers were women aged 18-34, and 97% were in the UK.
The videos directly increased the Showground’s follower count by 21%, and that means that all future posts by the client will reach a larger audience, while also making TikTok link all of those users with some level of interest in Lincolnshire Show. On top of that, the tug of war tournament is one of the attractions of Lincolnshire Show, meaning it gives people a flavour of what the Show is like, and it will hopefully encourage people to visit next year.
At risk of comparing apples and pears, if you were to pay for that kind of targeted reach through advertising, it would cost you a vast fortune- a full page ad in the Daily Telegraph (with similar reach) is around £59,000 – whereas, frankly, these videos took under an hour to make and publish (and our hourly rate is some way south of £59,000).
If you’d like any help with your organisation’s social media – you’re in the right place! Get in touch.
