Adam Holt on building a 500,000-follower TikTok as a board-certified entomologist

In June 2021, Adam Holt posted a TikTok duet beside someone else’s video of a tick being popped out of a leg with dental floss. He explained why it worked, and the video hit almost 10 million views in a few days. Adam now runs Name.Dat.Bug, a consulting company for pest control businesses, and the TikTok account of the same name has over 500,000 followers and more than 12 million likes.

I haven’t seen anyone in this industry crack TikTok the way Adam has, so I asked him to walk me through it. He joined me from Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and almost everything he described is something an owner with a phone could start this week.

Who is Adam Holt?

Adam Holt, B.C.E., is a board-certified entomologist with more than 25 years in the pest control industry, including high-level roles at some of its biggest companies, like Terminix. Around 2022 he was living in Philadelphia and working for Douglas Products. He did his master’s degree on a Florida field guide to bird lice, and he’s fascinated by ectoparasites and how diseases spread.

Today he runs Name.Dat.Bug Consulting, which helps pest control companies with licensing, social media, software and more. He wanted Name That Bug, but it was already taken, so the company and his TikTok are both branded with “Dat.”

Gross-out content gets watched

Adam started on TikTok during COVID because his wife told him to. He’d never heard of it. His first videos were 60-second science lessons for kids stuck at home, and they did all right, but not as well as he wanted.

So he studied what was trending and found what he calls gross-out content, like ticks, lice and mites. It was exactly what he already loved. He compares it to pimple popping and ASMR. Once the algorithm learns you like botfly removals, it keeps serving them, and his wife can’t even watch him scroll.

Jake Sheldon and I had just talked about the same effect in Facebook ads. Ads that spark a little anxiety beat the smiling technician or the family with the dog. Adam agreed. A brown recluse makes people picture getting bitten, and mosquitoes keep showing up in the news with malaria and dengue fever.

Post 3 times a day

Adam’s first rule was volume. He posted 3 times a day and calls that the minimum. It sounds like a lot, he admits, but with today’s AI tools you can make 3 posts and schedule them ahead of time. It’s rare for a single video to go viral at random, and as he put it, “the more bait you put in the water, the more fish you catch.”

When one does hit, keep posting. You’re on the For You page now, and decent follow-ups tend to ride along.

Around 2023, 2 of his videos hit 50 million views each. Once you have 10,000 followers and meet TikTok’s other creator program requirements, videos over a minute long can earn money. Adam’s rough math is about $100 per million views, which put his 50-million-view videos at around $5,000. That’s also why so many big influencers post videos that run 1 minute and 1 second.

He doesn’t post 3 times a day anymore. He’s past half a million followers and focused on growing the consulting business.

Copy the hashtags and sounds that are already winning

Even at 3 posts a day, Adam felt something was missing. He searched his phone for the top 10 viral TikTok hashtags and started using them, then learned to find the trending background music that went with them. Once he put it all together, his views started climbing.

His usual tags are FYP, For You, viral and trending, plus something like gross-out or bug talk to fit the video. You don’t need a ton, and 5 to 10 is plenty. TikTok shows how many times each tag has been clicked as you type it, and landing on someone’s For You page, he said, is the golden ticket.

Adam doesn’t think TikTok gives you a real way to do SEO on a video, since the title just sits over it, so to him the hashtags are its SEO. I’ve written about how SEO covers TikTok videos as well as websites, and his hashtag research is a good example.

Raw beats polished

I used to be a freelance copywriter, and every top copywriter says the hook matters most. So I asked Adam what happens in his first 3 to 5 seconds. He said he’s never really thought about it. He just makes the video.

He thinks what scares most people off is assuming every post will take hours. Adam edits everything himself in TikTok’s built-in editor, splicing out stumbles when he’s talking. If the first take is good, he posts it.

“I can go watch TV and watch all the pre-recorded, acting out stuff. That’s not what people go to social media for. They go to social media for the raw content.”

My PCM partner Jonas Olson puts more weight on hooks in his pest control social media guide, and as a copywriter I lean his way. Both of them shoot on a phone, though, and Adam’s case for raw video lines up with what Mat Rogers told me about owners loosening up on social so people feel like they know them.

Use your phone, but turn on the flash

Any iPhone works, Adam said. You don’t need the Max, but put in a little effort. In a house with bed bugs, turn on the flash and tap to focus, so you don’t get home to a video you can’t use. He gives technicians the same advice about photos. When one sends him a bug that “looks like a piece of pepper,” he asks for the flash and a coin for size.

For talking videos, he usually films the infestation, then green screens himself over it later in a clean company shirt, with a small Bluetooth mic that plugs into the phone. If you’d rather stay off camera, record a voiceover and turn it into captions, which also reach viewers who are hard of hearing or deaf. A cheap folding tripod fits in a technician’s bag and keeps the green screen shots steady.

One video, 4 platforms

Adam always posts to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook Reels, and he thinks everyone should be on LinkedIn. It’s all free. You can pay to push a post, but you don’t have to.

Around 2022, Facebook ran a Reels contest. Adam didn’t even have a Reels account, so he started one and reposted about 80 of his TikToks in 3 days. In 2 to 3 weeks he went from zero to 16,000 followers. He didn’t win, but he qualified for the bonus.

Almost every job Adam has had came through LinkedIn, and it’s how we met. Most of my own opportunities start there too, even though I built my first following on Twitter and barely made any money from it. TikTok is global, and through it Adam got to know the man who runs DAP Pest Control in Australia, who made the news for a wasp nest that filled a bathroom from floor to ceiling. Like I told Adam, content is a cheat code for networking.

If you repost someone else’s video, get permission and give them credit in the video. Getting shadowbanned can happen on any platform, Adam warned, and it’s really hard to dig yourself out.

TikTok is a search engine for younger buyers

When Adam moved to San Diego, he typed “San Diego sushi” into TikTok, found Cannonball on the beach, saw the food and the view, and went. He found his chiropractor the same way.

I don’t use TikTok myself. But I’d seen a study saying around 40% of Gen Z uses TikTok to search, and those people are in their 20s and starting to buy homes.

I asked whether TikTok makes sense for a small owner doing about $100K a year. Adam thinks social media makes sense for anybody, as long as you’re ready for the demand if a video takes off.

I don’t think you need to go viral at all. A lot of clients find me somewhere else and then see the podcast, and a TikTok full of real jobs can do the same work. Direct leads are another question. Plumber Roger Wakefield once told me he’d drop TikTok today if he could, because it doesn’t bring him customers, and Jonas finds Facebook brings better local leads than TikTok. Adam mentioned a pest control company on TikTok with a little over 300,000 followers that lists its states in its bio and links to its website, and he’d love to know what that brings in.

Let the news and the seasons write your posts

Coming up with 60 to 90 videos a month scares owners off, so I asked Adam where the ideas come from.

Start with the season. If mosquitoes are bad, make mosquito videos. He did a branding campaign for BugMD’s mosquito patches, edited it more than usual, and still spent only about 20 minutes on it. You could also green screen yourself over a Fight the Bite poster and walk through the 5 Ds of prevention.

Then watch the news. Adam pointed to 4 rodents in Riverside County, near LA, that tested positive for bird flu, and to Gene Hackman’s wife dying from hantavirus. Repost a story like that with your branding and tell your community what it means for them. He’d also seen a LinkedIn post on research linking bed bugs to MRSA, something BCEs had long talked about as a possibility. Film a bed bug job and explain how you help keep people safe from things like that.

And once a video hits, repost it about a month later, after things die down, to see if it catches again.

Some viral videos show what not to do. A kid bought cockroach gel bait on Amazon, laid down far more than the label’s small, spaced-out dots, and filmed the roaches dying. To Adam, it showed a product being misapplied against its label, and he wanted to answer it with a duet.

“This is why it’s important to hire a professional. Following the label, we’re keeping you safe. We’re keeping your environment safe.”

I told Adam that pest control owners know a lot more than they think. Even 5 or 10 years in the field is 5 or 10 more than anyone watching, and that’s authority to talk about whatever’s in the news.

My take

At the end of the episode I called this a master class on TikTok for pest control, and I think it carries over to every other platform. Adam got to half a million followers by posting 3 times a day and borrowing the tags and sounds that were already working, without spending much thought on his hooks.

His flash advice goes well beyond TikTok. I’ve looked at a lot of pest control Google Business Profiles, and a good number have 5 photos or none. Some of the ones with photos are so blurry they look like they came off a phone from 15 years ago. If your techs are already filming jobs for social, that footage can fix your profile too.

As AI content fills every feed, I think people will want to see the actual founder and the actual technicians, which is why I record real conversations and repurpose the clips for my own marketing.

Where to find Adam

On the show, Adam offered to help any owner who needs content to post.

• Website: namedatbug.com
• TikTok: @namedatbug
• LinkedIn: Adam Holt, BCE
• Instagram: @namedatbug