How to grow on TikTok and other video platforms is the top priority for publishers today. The Philadelphia Inquirer, a venerable U.S. publisher reaching over 7 million people monthly, faced a crucial bandwidth issue: balancing traditional traffic with the urgent need to expand into video-first spaces.
They needed a solution that would dramatically improve newsroom efficiency and answer the question: How to grow on TikTok without hiring an entirely new team?
😩 The pain point: When manual posting blocked TikTok growth
For Ray Boyd, Director of Syndication and Social Media, the manual workflow killed their ability to innovate. They were stuck posting manually to X and Facebook because they didn’t trust their previous system’s automation.
This meant they had “much less time on platforms like Instagram and pretty much no time on TikTok.” The social team was aware of the opportunity—building direct engagement with younger audiences—but lacked the bandwidth to execute.
As Boyd noted: “It’s really about direct engagement on these platforms and building relationships.” To achieve this kind of growth, they needed to fundamentally change their workflow
🧠 The game-changer: Trusting AI to enable strategic TikTok growth
The Philadelphia Inquirer sought an intelligent solution that provided confidence in automated posting. They chose Echobox for its robust AI that intelligently automates time-consuming manual tasks.
The core benefit was simple: by automating their main social channels, the team instantly created the time needed for strategic development. This allowed them to immediately focus on planning and creating native video content to help them grow on TikTok.
Now, AI handles automated posting during off-hours, while the team uses the newly freed-up time during the day to create video content. Boyd confirmed: “Our onboarding with Echobox aligned with us ramping up our TikTok strategy because it created much more time for the social editors to be able to plan, script and shoot social video.”
🥳 The big win: 26 hours daily leads to 25,000+ new followers
The implementation was a huge success, showing that time savings are directly convertible into new audience growth.
| Key Operational Metric | The Improvement |
| Time Freed Up (Daily) | An incredible 26 Hours |
| New TikTok Followers | Roughly 25,000+ |
The time savings immediately translated into massive social video growth: “We’ve seen massive gains in terms of social video viewership and engagement on Instagram and TikTok. Since last year, we’ve gained roughly 25,000 new followers on TikTok alone. Our Instagram rate of growth is way up. It’s the time savings from Echobox that have allowed us to devote the necessary time to the platforms and get that growth.”
Ultimately, Echobox provided the necessary newsroom efficiency to enable The Inquirer’s successful answer to how to grow on TikTok. Would Boyd recommend it? “Oh yeah, I would definitely recommend it.”
