Education influencers achieve a wide reach on TikTok by sharing information and knowledge. Unlike in formal educational settings, the community engages with this content on a voluntary basis. Therefore, the videos must gain visibility in the platform’s tableau of diverse content and the creators must build a relationship with their community that ensures their long-term loyalty to the respective account or the associated brand in order to open up monetisation opportunities. Based on an analysis of the most successful videos of 2023 from four major TikTok accounts in the fields of physical and mental health, this paper traces media-aesthetic characteristics and communicative practices in the creation of educational content on TikTok between knowledge transfer and self-branding. It shows the means used by creators to establish an allegedly friendly relationship with their followers and how they emphasise their personal expertise and the added value of their own videos in order to motivate their community to interact more with the content and use additional (paid) services.