Here’s How a TikTok Challenge Goes Viral
Compelling audio and something to do energizes TikTok’s engaged userbase, as Ashley Jenkins and Danilla Carvalho know
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Two of the key currencies of TikTok have become more trackable thanks to a new chart set up by Pentos, the TikTok analysis company. A viral music chart, which tracks the use and popularity of different audio tracks on TikTok by using the weighted growth of songs using the number of new posts, likes, shares and comments over the last 24 hours tries to show how songs are travelling across the app.
Since the weekend, a mainstay in Pentos’s viral music charts has been a track uploaded by a single mother of two living in Thompsons Station, Tennessee. And it’s not even music.
Ashley Jenkins’s family had visited town for Christmas, and for the Jenkins clan that meant one thing: party games. “We do funny activities and challenges, and this was one we just wanted to try out,” says Jenkins. It was one the mother of two had seen on the internet called the fish challenge, which makes participants lie face-down on the floor, hands behind their back, and try to get to their feet without rolling on their side.
The fish challenge was one of many the Jenkins family tried over Christmas, including the ninja challenge and the moo challenge, where you try and make others laugh. “We did a bunch of different challenges like that,” says Jenkins, who works as a logistics co-ordinator for a shipping company.
And like many family gatherings in the 21st century, cameraphones rapidly came out to capture the chaos. While Jenkins was on the floor trying to do the fish challenge alongside her boyfriend, her family members were filming her on their phones. Jenkins, who joined TikTok after being recommended it by a friend as a successor to Vine and Musical.ly (both of which she used regularly), decided to share it on the app on December 30th. “I like to post on TikTok any time I find something fun or funny to do,” she says.
