TikTok creators have more ways to optimize their content for users’ searches, thanks to a significant increase in the length of video descriptions.

According to a notification sent to users, TikTok is expanding the length of descriptions from 300 characters to 2,200 characters.

In addition to making content more discoverable, TikTok said it uses description text to decide which videos to recommend to users.

Social media analyst Matt Navarra shared a screenshot of the message he received about the change:

Wow…! TikTok has increased the video description character limit to 2,200 characters!

This is huge for creators and huge in terms of TikTok’s plans for becoming a search engine pic.twitter.com/kGhnL97uUM

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) September 23, 2022

The message reads:

“You can now type up to 2200 characters in the descriptions of your posts: This allows you to express more details about your creations, describing what your videos show , gives you the opportunity to get closer to your audience, generate more engagement while becoming more discoverable. and better recommend TikTok to viewers.”

Younger generations are increasingly using TikTok as a search engine, and TikTok is relying more on this by allowing users to make their videos more search-friendly.

I first wrote about this change in search behavior back in June, when TikTok started adding links to search results in video descriptions.

Look: Can TikTok Become a Search Engine? For Many Users, This Is It

In July, Google publicly acknowledged that TikTok and Instagram are the preferred search engines for a large number of young people.

Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan said:

“In our study, almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.”

Increasing the length of video descriptions from 300 to 2,200 characters allows users to optimize videos for more search terms.

For example, local businesses that market themselves on TikTok can include more keywords related to their city and state.

That can increase their chances of being found for a query like “independent businesses in downtown Toronto.” And they’ll have plenty of room to add descriptive text about the video.

Character augmentation also allows creators to add more context to what people see in a video.

Creators often provide additional details through in-video captions, but that text isn’t helpful to search engines.

Let’s not forget that Google indexes TikTok videos. Writing detailed descriptions can make videos more discoverable on traditional search engines and TikTok.

It will be interesting to see what the creators choose to do with the thousands more characters in a video description.

Will creators fill in the description area with keywords, like in the early days of SEO?

Do they spam the description area with hashtags, like people do on Instagram?

It will take some experimentation to learn what works for TikTok search, so we can see all of the above.

TikTok SEO is an area I’ll be keeping an eye on as extended character lengths roll out to more people.

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