Did you notice? TikTok was gone for less than a day, and the world kept spinning. My question to you is, whether TikTok is here or not, how are other major platforms NOT trying to steal the show?
TikTok is a force. It has become the primary tool for shaping young minds, with often much-maligned, mindless content. The platform has launched dance crazes and brands galore.
If you spend an hour on TikTok, you will come to understand the role of social media marketing. It is a completely different animal from mainstream marketing, and it is possibly even more effective than traditional methods. Twitter made its missteps and along came BlueSky. Facebook is just now starting to do things to alienate some of its users, and other tools are starting to emerge.
The threat of TikTok going down, whether it happens or not at this point, opened a door that nobody stepped through. There was a brief news story about Red Note, but that was just a news story. How come Patreon didn’t step up and do a full-scale campaign? Why not push money from Instagram or Pinterest to hijack the conversation and take advantage of the situation?
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I’ve seen this story before.
Often executives don’t want to be seen as ambulance chasers, so they don’t jump in to hijack a story for the benefit of their own brand. I was at web conference company Webex when the pandemic started, and I saw firsthand a CEO ask us not to approach the media and offer our service for free to users for fear that it would look like ambulance-chasing.
In contrast, the CEO of Zoom stepped right up on the 24-hour news channels and said Zoom would be free to anyone who wanted it. We pushed and pleaded to do the same for Webex, and the rest is history. We gave it away free after Zoom had already acquired the market, and everything else was fighting over table scraps. We had a plan that would have propelled Webex, but we never had the chance to implement it.
I would assume that with the leadup to the TikTok ban, marketers for Instagram, YouTube and Patreon had those same plans in place and were either asked to wait, not do them, or simply were not granted the funds to do so.
Now that we have a new administration that has pledged to keep TikTok, it is less likely that TikTok will go away. It is now a bargaining chip in a larger trade war, and one that will affect more than just the people who visit TikTok daily.
For the weeks leading up to and following Jan. 19, I'm still surprised I’m not seeing someone else roll out the messaging of the “we’re TikTok, but better, safer and made in the USA” or something else along those lines. I am utterly astonished that nobody wants to chase that ambulance at least a little bit. After all, those ambulance chasers can afford to run TV ads all day every day on my local news and programming, so there must be some benefit to what they do, right?
For now, TikTok is business as usual, and scrolling will continue. Fast-forward 10 years, and TikTok may be the Myspace of this generation. That platform was huge for a brief period and was then surpassed by others who improved on the formula. It remains to be seen who will be left standing in 10 years. Let’s all get our popcorn and watch.