How to Get Recommended on TikTok, Reels and Shorts: What the Platforms’ Own Rules Say

A video is published, gets a few hundred views, and the counter stops. “Why does TikTok max out at 500-600 views and that’s it? Kazakhstan region, I do good video uniquification,” a user asks on a Russian-language forum ¹. In 2020, TikTok explained it this way: “If viewers continue to find your video interesting, it will continue to be recommended” ². In other words, the video keeps being shown as long as viewers find it interesting.

Getting recommended, or “landing in the recs,” as creators put it, means passing two platform checks. The first check is eligibility: can the video be shown to people who don’t follow you? The second check is retention. All three platforms run it, and this is what they have in common. At the eligibility stage, a video may be kept from non-followers entirely, or shown to fewer of them. Retention is not a yes-or-no check but a scale. TikTok and Instagram check reposts of someone else’s video or your own as part of eligibility. YouTube’s rule on reused content concerns channel monetization.

What applies to whom. Did you shoot the video yourself and publish it on one account? Of the eligibility conditions, the ones that apply to you are video quality and sound (step 3). Other reasons a video may be ineligible are in the section on eligibility. The main thing for you is retention. The steps below are written for you. Do you re-upload other people’s videos or spread one video across several accounts? Also read the sections on eligibility and on copies.

In short, here is what to do. Publish videos without another platform’s watermarks. Hook viewers from the first seconds. Check your analytics to see where viewers leave.

We are the Video Unique Booster team. We make a program that prepares copies of a video for several accounts. We did not promote our own accounts for this article. It is a review of the platforms’ rules plus our own measurement. We read the rules of TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, their help pages and their advice to creators. We went through a study of real TikTok users’ feeds. We also reviewed 8 Russian-language articles from search results, 12 discussion threads on Russian-language sites and 5 Russian-language YouTube videos. Our measurement on 10 videos is in the “our measurement” section.

We also have our own experience with this, on Reels. From March to August 2025, we ran a network of about 300 Instagram accounts and published only Reels. We have an insights export for 217 of them. Those 217 accounts had 141 followers between them. So almost all the views came from non-followers. We tried TikTok on one account of our own and Shorts on three or four channels. For those two, this article relies on the platforms’ rules, not on our experience.

Who this article is for

For those who publish short videos and want people other than their followers to see them. For those who publish one video on several accounts or on several platforms. For those who have tried hashtags and posting times, and the counter still doesn’t move.

Not for those who want to tune their own feed as viewers. That is a different question. And not for those looking for ways around the platforms’ rules. Here, those rules are given from the primary sources.

Video Unique Booster for Windows: hundreds of unique copies in one goBy hand, you edit copy after copy. The program creates them in batches. Each copy gets its own image, sound, metadata and duration.

How to get recommended: what to do

The steps below are the platforms’ own advice to creators. TikTok’s advice comes from Creator Academy: a 2024 article about the video itself ³ and a 2025 article about analytics ⁴. Where a tip appears only in TikTok’s 2020 post ², the year is given. Where we derived a tip from a signal ourselves, we say so.

1. Post a video that hasn’t been on the platform before. Instagram advises posting content you created yourself or content that hasn’t been posted on Instagram before ⁵. TikTok keeps reused videos posted “without creative edits” out of the For You feed ⁶. Minimally edited videos don’t get in either. Instagram gives an example of what does count: your own narration, storyline or graphics ⁷. They should present the source material in a new way. YouTube gives the creator’s own commentary as an example ⁸.
2. No watermarks from another platform. Instagram is less likely to recommend videos with noticeable watermarks ⁵. Publish the original file, not a video downloaded from another social network.
3. Quality and sound. Instagram shows fewer videos that are low-resolution, muted or framed with borders ⁹. It also shows fewer videos where text takes up most of the content ⁹. This applies to your own video on a single account too.
4. Vertical format and length. TikTok says both vertical videos and horizontal videos in full-screen mode work. It advises choosing the length to suit the type of video ³. On Instagram, a reel must be three minutes or less to be recommended ⁵. YouTube advises making the length appropriate to the content ¹⁰.
5. The first seconds. YouTube advises Shorts creators to think about how the first 1-2 seconds will grab viewers ¹¹. According to YouTube, viewers decide to stay or move on in the first seconds, so the intro should be kept concise ¹². Get straight to the point. TikTok advises hooking viewers within the first 5 seconds ³. Instagram separately predicts whether a viewer will leave before three seconds ¹³.
6. Retention: find where viewers leave. In 2020, TikTok wrote that it takes watch time into account in recommendations ². Check your own watch time in your analytics. On TikTok, these are Average watch time and Watched full video ⁴. Names here and below follow the English version of the interface; in other language versions they may differ. Retention rate is the percentage of the video that viewers watched. TikTok advises using it to find where viewers leave, and then to work out why they lost interest at that point. For Shorts, YouTube measures average view duration and average percentage viewed ¹⁴. It advises looking at both numbers ¹⁰. You can see average view duration in YouTube Studio: Analytics, the Content tab, then Shorts ¹⁵. The help pages we were able to open don’t say where Instagram shows Reels retention. Instagram advises comparing your content by reach and looking for patterns ⁵. Our conclusion: compare your videos with each other. Cut what comes right before the point where viewers leave.
7. What holds viewers. TikTok advises structuring a video like a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end ³. It also recommends on-screen text and captions. Over 30% of TikTok survey respondents watch videos on mute ³.
8. Caption, hashtags, sound. TikTok advises a clear caption and hashtags relevant to the video ³. How many to use is covered in the section on hashtags. According to TikTok, videos with background music get 98.31% more views on average ³. In 2020, TikTok wrote that sound helps people find a video through sound search ². And other people can use your sound in their own videos ². For Shorts, sounds from YouTube’s Audio Library help a video appear on the sound page ¹⁴.
9. Trial reels and collabs on Instagram. A trial reel is first shown only to people who don’t follow you ¹⁶. This shows how the video does with an audience that doesn’t know you. A post made with the Collabs feature is shown to the followers of both creators. It can also be recommended ⁵.

How to tell if your video is being recommended

• TikTok. The video’s analytics show whether it is eligible for recommendations ¹⁷. The “Traffic source” section shows how viewers found your posts ⁴. There, TikTok separates the For You feed, your profile and search ¹⁸. Traffic from the For You feed is your recommendation traffic.
• Instagram. Account Status shows whether your content is eligible to be recommended to non-followers ⁵. In insights, Accounts Reached is broken down by followers and non-followers. The non-follower share is your reach beyond your own audience. It includes both recommendations and search.
• YouTube. In YouTube Studio, open Content, then the video, then Analytics and the Reach tab ¹⁹. In the “How viewers find this video” card, the Shorts source is traffic from the Shorts feed. We found no marker of recommendation eligibility in YouTube’s help pages.

How the recommendation algorithm judges a video: retention on all three platforms

The platforms’ algorithms are closed. But each platform publishes what it looks at. We put the table below together from their texts. The year is given where it appears on the page.

Platform	What is named as a signal	Source
TikTok, 2020	finishing a longer video; likes, shares, follows, comments	20
Instagram, Reels, 2023	reshare, watching all the way through, like, going to the audio page	9
Instagram, Reels system card, 2025	watching longer than 95% of viewers of reels of the same length; watching less than three seconds	13
YouTube, Shorts, undated	share of viewers who chose to view; average view duration and average percentage viewed	14

What all three have in common is retention. In 2020, TikTok called finishing a longer video “a strong indicator of interest” ²⁰. For Reels, Instagram puts watching all the way through among its four most important predictions ⁹. According to YouTube, videos in the Shorts feed are ranked “based on their performance and relevancy to that individual viewer” ¹⁴. In other words, by how people watch them and by the interests of the specific viewer. All three also name likes; YouTube does so in its general help page ²¹.

In Meta’s Reels system card, retention is compared with reels of the same length ¹³. So in this model, being short does not win on retention by itself. But Instagram also counts watching all the way through separately ⁹, and a short video is easier to watch all the way through.

Researchers analyzed the feeds of real TikTok users ²². In the first thousand videos, the feed matches a person’s known interests 30-50% of the time. So half of the feed or more is videos outside those interests. Instagram states its goal this way: “give everyone a chance to find their audience” ⁹. TikTok says directly that you don’t need a million followers to make it onto the For You feed ³.

Hashtags and posting time: what the platforms themselves say

TikTok advises 2-3 hashtags relevant to the video ³. In its words, “less is more.” In 2020, it wrote that more hashtags won’t guarantee a broader reach ². Instagram mentions hashtags alongside keywords in your caption: they help people find you through search ⁵. YouTube names a limit: if a video has more than 60 hashtags, it ignores all of them ²³. The Instagram tips we opened give no number of hashtags. On a Russian-language forum about TikTok, people name a limit of 6 hashtags, or sometimes 9 ²⁴.

In 2020, TikTok wrote that the number of videos you post doesn’t affect how they are recommended in the For You feed ². YouTube has no minimum posting cadence for Shorts ¹⁴. Instagram mentions posting time among the information about a post in Feed ⁹. Next to it is how quickly people like and comment on the post. Posting time does not appear among the signals named for Reels, TikTok and YouTube. The platforms don’t name a single hour that works for everyone. TikTok advises checking the Followers tab of your analytics to see when your viewers are active. It advises posting on the most active days, at most two hours before the peak ¹⁸.

Why a video doesn’t get recommended: eligibility rules

The platforms have many reasons for making a video ineligible. For example, in 2020 TikTok wrote that a newly uploaded video or a video under review may not be recommended ²⁰. Instagram has separate Recommendation Guidelines ⁹. Below we look at the part about originality and reposts. This is where the platforms differ the most.

TikTok. Its Community Guidelines have an Integrity and Authenticity section ⁶. A line from it: “Content is also ineligible for the FYF if it includes unoriginal or reused material without anything new.” FYF is the For You feed, so unoriginal or reused material with nothing new in it stays out of that feed. The line sits in the part about other people’s intellectual property. TikTok’s own example of such material is videos with someone else’s watermark or logo. There is also a rule for accounts ²⁵. If an account posts a lot of such content, TikTok may remove the whole account from the feed. Such an account also becomes harder to find. Creators call this a shadowban. We cover it in the article shadowbans on TikTok (in Russian). The creator sees in the analytics that a video was made ineligible ¹⁷. If the decision seems wrong, it can be appealed ²⁶. What else to do in that case is covered in the article 0 views on TikTok (in Russian).

Instagram. Its Original Content Guidelines are about other people’s work ⁷, meaning videos you had no role in creating. Instagram also considers such videos unoriginal when they have only low-effort edits: “borders, watermarks, speed changes, just crediting the original creator.” An unoriginal video may not be shown to people who don’t follow you. If most of an account’s posts are like this, the restriction applies to the whole account. The rule does not affect followers. We cover this from the creator’s side in the article shadowbans on Instagram (in Russian). There are three ways to get distribution to non-followers back ⁷. The first is to remove the unoriginal posts. The second is to appeal the decision in Account Status. The third is to post original content until it makes up the majority over a 30-day period.

YouTube. It has a policy on reused content ⁸. This is content that is already on YouTube or elsewhere online, to which the creator has added no commentary of their own, no substantial changes, and no educational or entertainment value. The examples include short videos compiled from other social media websites. Reviewers look at the channel to understand how the creator filmed or made the videos. If it isn’t clear that the creator made them, the channel may lose monetization entirely. We found no rules in YouTube’s help pages on recommendation eligibility for reused content. What creators call a shadowban on YouTube is covered in the article shadowbans on YouTube (in Russian).

Platform	What is restricted	Where you see it	How to get it back
TikTok	the video and the whole account; the account is harder to find	analytics 17	appeal the decision 26
Instagram	distribution to non-followers, for the video and for the whole account	Account Status 7	remove, appeal, or post original content until it makes up the majority over 30 days
YouTube	channel monetization, not distribution	not stated in the help pages we reviewed	not stated in the help pages we reviewed

One video on several accounts and platforms

These are two different cases, and the rules for them differ.

Your own video on three platforms. The rules we reviewed contain no direct ban on publishing your own video on TikTok, Reels and Shorts. On a Russian-language forum, one user writes: “seems to be no problem for me either, I’ve been uploading to TikTok, Insta, YouTube and Dzen [a Russian-language blogging platform] for several months now” ²⁷. There are two caveats. Instagram shows fewer videos with watermarks ⁹, so you need the original file (step 2). YouTube checks whether the channel makes it clear that the creator made the videos ⁸.

One video on several accounts on the same platform. Instagram shows fewer videos “that have already been posted on Instagram” ⁹. This applies to your own videos too, not only to other people’s. In its 2020 explanation of the feed, TikTok wrote: “We also don’t recommend duplicated content” ²⁰. TikTok’s Community Guidelines allow multiple accounts, as long as they are not used “to deceive others or break the rules” ⁶. Among the kinds of spam, they list “Using automation to run many accounts or send repetitive content.” Using another account to get around restrictions is also prohibited. In a Russian-language forum thread about Reels, experiences differ. One creator writes: “the video I post first gets many times more views.” Another: “we just copy them and they all get lots of views” ²⁸. TikTok’s rules on multiple accounts are broken down point by point in the article 0 views on a new account (in Russian).

We saw that reposting the same video hurts on Reels before the network. On one account of our own, other people’s videos from other social networks, unedited, soon started getting zero views. In the network we no longer published such videos. Unique copies also sometimes stayed at zero on some accounts, while on others they brought views. In the export, half of the 217 accounts had no more than 9.5% of videos with zero views.

The conclusion: under the platforms’ rules, each account needs its own version of the video. The platforms don’t specify where low-effort edits end and creative edits begin. We measured our program’s copies in the article Instagram account networks (in Russian). The edits there were framing, brightness and contrast, noise, sharpness, duration and sound. Color correction was turned off. The copies were compared with each other, not with the original. The fingerprint was the same pHash as in our measurement below. The measurement in that article used three videos with 20 copies each, at that article’s settings. The key number in it is the distance between the closest pair of copies. For the program, it came out at 1 to 1.75 bits out of 64. If you select copies that are at least two bits apart from each other, 15-18 of the 20 remain. That is why copies are checked in pairs and only the selected ones are published. The platforms’ systems are closed, so this is a measure of similarity, not of eligibility.

Can a machine still recognize a repost after a border, mirror flip or speed-up? Our measurement

On a Russian-language forum, people ask whether “mirroring the picture, adding a graphic element to the video, speeding it up” will help ²⁸. Of these edits, Instagram explicitly calls borders, watermarks and speed changes low-effort ⁷. The platforms don’t mention mirroring. We checked how much such edits change a video for a simple machine comparison. We reviewed 8 Russian-language articles from search results (US location, two phrasings of the query, September 2026). None of them has such a measurement.

How we measured. In September 2026, we took 10 videos of real footage from the VISION dataset ²⁹: ten different phones, the dataset’s “outdoor” scene category, the first 10 seconds. A Python script made 7 copies of each. The black border is a frame of about 8% on each side. The watermark is a semi-transparent “@my_account” caption in a corner. The re-encode is at CRF 28. There is also a 1.1x speed-up, a mirror flip and cropping 5% off each edge. We took 9 frames from each copy and compared them with the original. For the sped-up copy, the frame was taken at the same point in the content, adjusted for speed. The tool is the pHash perceptual hash from the imagehash library ³⁰, an open 64-bit frame fingerprint. That makes 90 frame pairs for each row of the table. A measurement of image and audio fingerprints on full videos is in the article checking a video for uniqueness (in Russian). Here we tested the edits from Instagram’s list, plus three common ones: mirroring, cropping and re-encoding. Our program’s copies were not part of this measurement.

The third column is the same comparison with two steps. The first step crops dark borders at the edges. The second also compares the frame with its mirror image.

Copy	Difference from the original	Same with two steps
re-encode (CRF 28)	0	0
your own watermark in a corner	2	2
1.1x speed-up	0	0
5% cropped off each edge	10	10
black border	22	0
mirror flip	32	0
all at once	34	10
different video (control)	32	30

The numbers are medians over 90 frame pairs. 0 means that the frames are identical as far as the fingerprint can tell. About 32 is the level of a different video.

What this means if you make copies. For a comparison to recognize these copies, it is enough to crop dark borders and check the mirror image. For a sped-up copy, also match the frames by time. With these steps, edge cropping moves furthest from the original: 10 bits.

Limits of the measurement. pHash is an open and simple fingerprint. The platforms’ systems are closed, and how they compare videos is unknown. We did not measure them. Nor did we measure colored or blurred borders: the first step crops only dark borders. We aligned the sped-up copy by time ourselves. Sound, caption and account history are not part of the measurement.

You can compare your copies with the original yourself before publishing. How to do it is covered in the article checking a video for uniqueness (in Russian). How the program makes and checks copies is below, in the section on copies for several accounts.

Where this doesn’t work

An original video can also get little distribution. Eligibility is only the first check. After that, viewers decide. On a Russian-language forum, people put it more bluntly: “the whole problem is that your videos are just not interesting to viewers” ³¹.

The platforms’ advice is not a guarantee. In 2020, TikTok wrote: “views vary from video to video” ². The steps above remove reasons for a video not to be shown and help hold viewers. They don’t create interest in the topic itself.

On our Reels network, reach also built up in different ways. Sometimes a video got no reach at all on the first day and then gained it quickly over the next five days. Sometimes it was the other way around: a video got reach on the first day and then stopped gaining it.

Copies for several accounts: what the program does

Running several accounts? The rules from the section on them apply here too: repeated videos get less distribution. A video becomes your own when it has new content. The mechanical part of the job is making the copies differ from the original and from each other.

Video Unique Booster makes copies not with one edit from Instagram’s list but with many at once. You set a range for frame, color, texture, overlay and sound settings. For each copy, the program picks its own random value from that range. We measured such copies in the article on account networks. The result is in the section on several accounts.

The program has a similarity check. It compares each copy with the original and with the copies of the same video that are already made.

The check is off by default. You turn it on in the “Export” section. In the “Similarity check” field you choose the method, and in the “Similarity threshold” field you set the threshold. A copy above the threshold is marked in the table with “<- Above the threshold”. What to do with it is chosen in the “If similarity is above the threshold then” field. It has three options: “Delete”, “Delete and recreate” and “Do nothing”. With “Delete and recreate”, the program makes the copy again with new random values. This repeats until the similarity drops below the threshold or the attempts run out.

The “Video indexing v2” method catches near-identical copies of the same duration, for example ones where only brightness, contrast and noise were changed. It does not recognize a copy with a mirror flip or a black border: it compares frames without mirroring them and without cropping borders. It does not compare sound. By default, the program changes the duration of each copy. In the measurement in the article on account networks, the check removed some of the close pairs. But pairs closer than two bits remained: 1.75, 1.75 and 1.25 bits. So check copies for several accounts yourself as well. How to do this is covered in the article Instagram account networks (in Russian). New content, such as narration, a storyline or commentary, is added by a person; the program does not create it. The decision to show a video stays with the platform. The program does not promise that your videos will get recommended.

Frequently asked questions

What’s next

If your counter is stuck at zero rather than in the hundreds, read about 0 views on TikTok (in Russian). If the account is new, read about 0 views on a new account (in Russian). Running several Instagram accounts? The article Instagram account networks (in Russian) measures how many copies stay different. Which edits to make to a video for each platform is covered in three articles: video uniquification for TikTok (in Russian), video uniquification for Instagram (in Russian) and video uniquification for YouTube (in Russian).

Sources

The numbers in square brackets in the text refer to this list. TikTok’s rules are quoted from the version in effect since September 24, 2026. The rules and help pages of all three platforms were checked in September 2026.

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