Well, after a few days of back and forth, TikTok is back, at least for the next couple of weeks. Now, whether this is good or bad for the country’s defense, I can’t speak to, but from a marketing standpoint, there are all sorts of interesting ramifications.
The banning of TikTok, even for the short couple hours it was off, led to a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth on social media. And part of that reason is because a lot of people really enjoy using TikTok because of how good the algorithm is at showing you things that entertain you. But also there are people’s livelihoods that are completely dependent on TikTok to be successful, whether that’s a local business or an influencer, or people who are selling products that they were able to sell through TikTok. There are people for whom the closing of TikTok was not just a mere inconvenience, but a threat to their very way of life. In a culture that increasingly has a splintering of media habits, TikTok was a powerhouse.
Eventually, TikTok will fall by the wayside just because it’ll be less popular than it used to be. Like Facebook was once the dominant powerhouse and now is more of a middling player, social media is subject to trends. So what are some marketing lessons that we can learn from the closure of TikTok? There’s a fundamental difference between media that is rented and media that is owned. In our world, we tend to think that we own a social media channel that we use.
We own our Facebook page or we own our TikTok account, but we really don’t. It’s rented land while we are using it. For now, the owners of that land can change the terms of the agreement whenever they want to. People are usually worried about a channel’s owners decreasing reach and increasing the cost of advertising, or even, depending on the situation, getting kicked off by the platform owner. We’ve had clients who have broken no rules and get ad accounts and the like.
Restricted rented land is not permanent. But now we have an additional factor to consider. Whether our government will shut down the platform. For some reason, there is not a digital platform we really own. Even our website is hosted on other people’s servers, and our domain addresses rely on the DNS servers of the Internet to get web traffic.
But we do have more ownership over our website, over our email list, and over things like text message lists. Even things like Vimeo and YouTube have more of an ownership stake in them now. Some of the content may be limited in where it can reach based on that platform, but we still have a way to distribute information. SEO is also extremely volatile and building a business around that can be very dangerous because ultimately Google could turn your website off tomorrow. With all of this uncertainty, what should we do about it?
The first thing is we prioritize inbound marketing. With inbound marketing we create ways that we are ready to be found by our target market. Our website is communicative to a certain set of people with a certain set of problems. We instill trust in the website process with branding, real photography and well written copy. We also provide value to those coming to the website by sharing information or sharing expertise through free downloads of information that can also help us get contact information for prospects.
We also do not put all of our eggs in one basket. A home services company that may be actively investing to 12 to 15 channels of marketing at one time. Partially that is because attention is splintered in our society towards different platforms, whether that be social media, YouTube, television, radio, etc. But now we have the additional thought process of what happens if the government decides they don’t like a platform anymore. A diversification of distribution is more costly.
However, it may be a good investment in the future. At the time of writing, TikTok is back for at least a limited period of time. And so if you haven’t started thinking about how to diversify your interest across multiple platforms, now is the time. Not all content will perform the same across all platforms. Not all content will work at all on each platform.
So having a structured set of goals for each platform is helpful. And that’s not to say that you should be on every platform. You should be on the platforms that make the most sense for your target market. But if you’re only invested in one, our recommendation that would be to start a second one that has a similar demographics or related demographics to help secure your business in the case of an angry service provider or at anger government thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine Podcast. If you have any feedback, shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com and we look forward to seeing you on future episodes of the podcast.
