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Growth Lessons From TikTok's 'For You' Feature
How TikTok's 'For You' impacted growth, social media and the Internet.
Olabinjo Adeniran
October 07, 2025
In partnership with
TikTok is one of this decade’s biggest technology successes. The platform has grown to nearly 2 billion users, adding about 100 million new users in the last year alone. The company is so successful that it is the topic du jour for many governments, which seek to understand how it distributes content, whether to ban it, or the ownership structure of the company.
Several factors make TikTok an intriguing subject for study. It’s mobile-first, video-first, culturally impactful and has solved some challenging engineering problems. Today, I’d like us to examine TikTok’s For You feature and explore why it has been the most impactful aspect of social apps over the last decade.
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Now that bills have been paid, let’s discuss TikTok’s For You feature. As usual, feel free to skip to sections that interest you.
Table of Contents
When a new user joins a social media platform, the platform must surface relevant content to the user. Otherwise, the platform is entirely useless. There is nothing for the user to engage with, and since they’re new, they are unlikely to post or create anything.
The cold start problem is not limited to social platforms but is also prevalent among various technology products. How do we ensure that a new user becomes familiar with our product and starts using it to get value?
In the early days of the Internet, social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter relied on the social graph. The concept is simple: When a new user joins, they connect with or follow other users, which then exposes new content and increased engagement with the platform. The platform presents content for users to like, comment on, share with friends, or consume.
If you’ve ever used a social network that first recommended accounts for you to connect with or follow, they took advantage of the social graph (who you know or who you might know) to get you started.
The implication of this is that early social platforms used details from the sign-up process to surface new connections to a new user. LinkedIn requested email contacts to connect new users with their friends and colleagues. Facebook is famous for asking where you might have worked, where you went to school, the town you grew up in and some of your interests.
This data is fed into the “People you may know” feature. A list of friends and relatives for users to connect with.
Facebook’s People You May Know helps new and old users make new friends on the platform.
The Interest Graph - TikTok’s For You
TikTok flips this concept on its head.
After acquiring Musically in 2017 and merging it with TikTok, Bytedance (TikTok’s parent company) had an expansive library of content to deliver.
Based on a user’s heuristics (e.g. age, interests, location), TikTok could immediately deliver content to a user’s feed. It did not need to first connect the user with “people you may know”. The For You feed is the default content discovery engine in the application.
For You is deeply rooted in sophisticated, real-time machine learning infrastructure developed by its parent company, ByteDance, notably the Monolith recommendation system and Large Memory Network (LMN) architectures.
These inventions enable TikTok’s engine to understand videos based on several heuristics. The platform can then ‘tag’ or ‘group’ those videos to make sure that they are distributed to its users via the For You feed.
This instant feed gives TikTok a significant advantage over other platforms, with competitors trying to imitate its user experience and short video format. Many have fallen short, unable to understand the context within content, group them appropriately, and distribute them to the relevant users.
The For You feature on the Growth Case Studies TikTok account.
I didn't know this was an ad until I uploaded it.
The For You feed is a continuous, personalised stream of content based entirely on the user's inferred interests, behavioural signals, and engagement patterns. It is adaptive, unique to each user, and is strategically positioned as the default landing page when the application is opened.
While older platforms required explicit user permission (a "Follow" or a “Friend Request”) to deliver content, TikTok bypasses this entirely, using implicit behavioural data to rapidly prototype user identity without the cold-start problem, thereby ensuring instantaneous engagement.
TikTok For You’s Impact
The For You feature has a significant impact on TikTok’s users, internet creators and the larger technology ecosystem. Let’s take a look at its impact.
For TikTok’s users, the platform is a massive engagement machine; seeing videos you’re interested in as soon as you sign up is a game-changer. Watching the platform respond to your interests as they change or as you reject videos is incredible. While TikTok is popular among Gen Z, For You ensures that everyone, regardless of their interests or demographics, is catered to.
For content creators, brands and businesses, TikTok enables instant distribution of content to target audiences. Creators literally only have to post and trust that TikTok will get the videos to the right audience. Many creators claim that their TikTok videos significantly outperform those on other platforms that have adopted the short-form format. While TikTok achieves an average engagement rate of 2.34%, its competitors, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, deliver engagement rates of 1.48% and 0.91%, respectively.
For TikTok and ByteDance, the results are outstanding. TikTok reached 1 billion monthly users in 2021, with US users averaging 52 minutes per day on the platform and average users opening the app approximately 20 times a day.
For TikTok’s competitors, For You poses a threat to their business. Here’s how they have responded with numerous features.
Meta Platform Reels
Meta Platforms, who own Instagram and Facebook, responded to TikTok’s threat with Reels, a short-form video format within both applications. Reels is a successor to Meta’s Lasso - a standalone TikTok clone launched in 2018 and shuttered in 2020.
Meta’s Instagram Reels.
Image source: Meta.
YouTube Shorts
Google, which owns YouTube, has launched YouTube Shorts, a vertical short-form video feed integrated into the larger YouTube ecosystem.
YouTube Shorts within the YouTube app.
Image Source: YouTube.
Shorts are prominently placed within YouTube’s app, ensuring they receive visibility in search results and the user’s feed.
Meta’s Threads
Meta’s Threads, a Twitter clone, prioritises an algorithmic, interest-based feed over connections. Threads launched in 2023 with the For You and Following tabs.
Reddit Video Player
Reddit replicated a vertical video player interface and sequential viewing for video posts on mobile. Swiping left allows the user to watch similar videos. In 2023, Reddit introduced a Watch feed.
Twitter For You Feed
Twitter(now X) defaulted to a “For You” page in January 2023 - taking a page out of TikTok’s playbook. The company made “Following” the optional feed, prioritising algorithmic discovery over social connections.
OpenAI Sora
OpenAI’s Sora utilises the vertical video feed format and algorithmic recommendations for its AI-generated videos app.
The Verge
Beyond social platforms, tech publication The Verge debuted a “Today’s Stream” vs. “Following” feature. Allowing its readers to decide how they want news delivered.
TikTok’s For You - Drawbacks and Criticisms
TikTok’s For You feed has been criticised by many. Because it’s interest-based and hyperpersonalised, it creates echo chambers - where a user only sees what they are interested in. This is potentially dangerous, given increasing political polarisation and teenage exposure to harmful ideas.
Others criticise the lack of timestamps. A TikTok user could see a video from 3 months ago and engage with it as if it were recently relevant, because time doesn’t matter to the For You feed; old videos could resurface, potentially damaging a user’s point of view, since the context of time is nonexistent.
The company has responded by adding controls for the For You feed, allowing users to tap "Not Interested," filter keywords, manage topics, and refresh the feed.
Conclusion - solving more cold start problems
While TikTok contains a Following feed and a Friends feed, its For You page was revolutionary for a new social platform - fundamentally changing how social media users discover and engage with content. For You is a successful attempt to solve the cold start problem - how do we get users to take action with new software?
It’s made me think a lot and wonder - how else could we solve this? What can we do, and how can we help new users make the most of software where there’s a blank canvas?
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