How the TikTok side works
How TikTok matching works
Matching weighs follower bracket first and subject second — the same order as the Instagram side, for the same reason. Two accounts of wildly different sizes cannot help each other: the smaller one's attention is invisible to the larger, and the larger one's is a distortion the smaller one cannot sustain.
Why size outranks subject
This surprises people, because subject seems obviously more important. It is more important to the viewer. It is not more important to whether the match does anything.
Consider a 2,000-follower account matched with a 400,000-follower one. Four engagements from the small account are lost in the large one's ordinary hourly traffic. Four from the large account arrive on a video that normally sees a couple of hundred views, and that is a distortion, not a signal — which is exactly what the delivery ceiling exists to prevent.
Matching within a bracket means both sides are contributing something the other can actually use, which is the only arrangement where a mutual system is not quietly one-sided.
Then subject, then everything else
Within a bracket, subject decides the order. An exact subject match ranks above the parent category, which ranks above everything else.
Subject matters on TikTok for a reason it does not on a feed-based platform: attention that teaches the system something true about who your content suits is worth more than attention that teaches it something false. That argument is made in full on the wrong-audience page, and it is the reason subject is a weight rather than a filter.
What the TikTok board carries that Instagram's does not
A pairing rule. A save is only ever offered as the second step of a watch-then-save pair on the same video, because saves arriving with no watch time behind them are the exact pattern automated-engagement detection looks for. On Instagram, saves stand alone.
A delivery ceiling relative to the video's own reach — 30% — which has no Instagram equivalent, because TikTok publishes per-video view counts and Instagram does not.
An action-mix ceiling: no more than 25% of a video's views as saves and 8% as comments, with a floor of 2 so a freshly-posted video is not unmatchable before it has any reach to measure against.
Common questions
Can I choose who sees my video?
No. Choosing your own matches is how a system stops being a match and starts being an arrangement between the same few accounts, which is both detectable and useless.
What if my subject has too few accounts?
The match falls back to the parent category rather than to nothing. A near-miss inside your bracket is worth more than an exact subject match from an account twenty times your size.
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