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TikTok "For You" Feed

The Power of a Personalized "For You" Experience​

TikTok's success is deeply intertwined with its hyper-personalized "For You" feed. This stream of curated content keeps users engaged for an average of 56 minutes per day! (1) But what makes it so compelling?

  • Relevance Drives Engagement: Users are presented with content tailored to their unique interests, making the experience instantly engaging.
  • Community Building: Personalized feeds connect like-minded individuals, fostering a sense of belonging and encouraging interaction.
  • Data-Driven Insights: Accurate user preference data captured through engagement fuels more effective content recommendations and targeted advertising.

Challenges of Building a "For You" Feed​

Creating a compelling personalized feed goes far beyond simply recommending previously liked content. Key challenges include:

  • Breaking Filter Bubbles: Avoiding repetitive recommendations and ensuring users discover diverse content.
  • Personalizing for New Users: Delivering relevant recommendations even with limited interaction history.
  • Surfacing Fresh Content: Giving new items a chance to gain traction and potentially go viral.
  • Real-Time Responsiveness: Adapting recommendations on the fly based on user interactions.

TikTok's Winning Formula: A Blend of Signals and Speed​

TikTok masterfully combines multiple signals to power its recommendations:

  • User Attributes: Interests, location, and demographic information provide valuable context.
  • Content Features: Captions, hashtags, sounds, and even visual analysis of video frames contribute to understanding content.
  • Engagement Patterns: Likes, comments, shares, and watch time reveal user preferences.
  • Real-Time Infrastructure: Sophisticated systems ensure recommendations are updated quickly based on user behavior.
  • Session-Based Models: Capture short-term interests within a browsing session to deliver a dynamic and responsive feed.

You can delve deeper into the intricacies of TikTok's algorithm in our blog post.

Replicating the Magic with Shaped​

Shaped empowers you to recreate the magic of TikTok's "For You" experience with ease.
Our platform mirrors many of TikTok's key ingredients:

  • Comprehensive Data Ingestion: Connect Shaped to your data sources containing user profiles, item metadata, and interaction events.
  • Automated Model Selection: Shaped automatically chooses the best combination of models for content understanding, retrieval, scoring, and ordering based on your specific data and goals.
  • Real-Time Capabilities: Benefit from Shaped's real-time infrastructure to deliver up-to-the-minute personalized recommendations.

Bringing Your "For You" Feed to Life: A Practical Example​

Let's say you have users, posts, and post_views data in BigQuery:

1. Define Your Shaped Model:

model.yaml
---
model:
 name: post_recs
connectors:
 - type: Dataset
   id: bigquery_events
   name: bigquery_events
fetch:
 users: |
   SELECT
     user_id,
     country
   FROM
     bigquery_events.users
 items: |
   SELECT
     post_id as item_id,
     creator_id,
     tags,
     caption,
     song_id
   FROM
     bigquery_events.posts
 events: |
   SELECT
     user_id,
     post_id as item_id,
     created_at,
     CASE
       WHEN time_spent > 7 THEN TRUE
       ELSE FALSE
     END AS label
   FROM
     bigquery_events.post_views

2. Create Your Model:

shaped create-model --file model.yaml

3. Power Your Feed with Personalized Recommendations:

shaped rank --model-name post_recs --user_id "325913"

Example Response:

{
    "ids": [
        "21772",
        "20983",
        "96921",
        // ... more post IDs
    ],
    "scores": [
        0.98,
        0.92,
        0.87,
        // ... more scores
    ],
    "metadata": [
        {
            "creator_id": "@snowrider",
            "tags": ["#snowboard", "#snowboarding", ...],
            "caption": "BEST Day Of The Season! 🏂",
            "song_id": "58313"
        },
        // ... more post metadata
    ]
}

Conclusion​

Shaped provides the tools and technology to build engaging, personalized "For You" experiences that rival the best in the industry. Start building your own feed today and unlock the power of personalized discovery for your users!