Navigating the TikTok turmoil: what marketers need to know

Key Takeaways

1. The TikTok situation is a lesson in platform dependency

With 170 million U.S. users and billions in ad revenue, TikTok has become a cornerstone for many marketers. This uncertainty serves as a reminder to diversify strategies and not rely too heavily on a single platform, no matter how dominant it seems.

2. Secure your data before it’s too late

Marketers should act now to safeguard valuable assets. Key actions include:

• Download campaign data: Preserve historical performance metrics to analyze TikTok’s impact and benchmark future campaigns.
• Back up creative assets: Save videos and content for repurposing across other platforms.
• Maintain your records: Ensure all insights and key learnings from TikTok campaigns are documented to guide future strategy.

3. TikTok’s influence extends to other platforms

The algorithm that made TikTok revolutionary has shaped other platforms like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and LinkedIn. The content you’ve created for TikTok is far from lost—it can be repurposed across these channels to maintain your reach and engagement.

4. Watch for emerging platforms

An interesting trend has emerged as some users explore alternatives like Xiaohongshu, a hybrid of Instagram and Pinterest. While this platform isn’t suitable for everyone, keeping an eye on where users migrate can help marketers stay ahead of the curve.

5. Use this moment to evaluate TikTok’s impact

If TikTok’s future changes, marketers can treat this as an opportunity to understand its real value. Key considerations include:

• Incrementality analysis: Assess how TikTok has driven conversions and engagement compared to other platforms.
• Identify gaps: Understand what TikTok brought to your strategy and explore how to fill those gaps using other tools or channels.
• Seasonal impact: Use data from upcoming key dates like Valentine’s Day to evaluate how the absence of TikTok could affect performance.

6. Have a backup plan for ads and partnerships

For brands running ads or working with TikTok influencers, now is the time to consider alternative platforms. Maintaining strong relationships with creators and exploring other advertising channels will ensure business continuity, no matter the outcome.

7. Small brands need a plan for organic reach

TikTok’s algorithm has been a game-changer for small businesses, offering unparalleled organic reach. Losing this channel would mean exploring new ways to build community, including newsletters and leveraging other video-focused platforms.

8. Flexibility is essential in times of uncertainty

With ongoing reports of potential delays and new developments, staying adaptable is crucial. Keep monitoring updates, communicate with your audience about where to find you, and have a strategy ready for any outcome.

Read full transcript below:

Edward Ford:

Hi, I'm Edward from Supermetrics, and this is the Marketing Intelligence Show, the podcast that empowers marketing leaders to work better with their data and make sure every marketing dollar counts. Now let's get into today's episode.

Evan Kaeding:

Hey there, and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Intelligence Show. My name is Evan Kaeding and I'll be your host today. Joining me we have Kristina Knut, our brand and social media strategist. It's here at Supermetrics. Today we'll be talking about TikTok and the impending ban of its operations in the US. Coming up in just a couple of days, Kristina brings a unique perspective based on her role at Supermetrics and her experience living and working in China for several years. Kristina, welcome to the show.

Kristina Knut:

Thank you so much for having me, Evan. It's awesome to be on the podcast. It's going to be an interesting, interesting episode. It's almost like covering live news

Evan Kaeding:

In a way. It is. The situation is continually evolving, but perhaps before we get into the issue at hand, would you like to introduce yourself to the audience?

Kristina Knut:

Yeah, sure thing. So I have been with Supermetrics for the past two and a half years. I run most of the socials in this company. So in addition to TikTok itself, we probably mainly operate on LinkedIn, but also Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter. Also threads. That's kind of like a side one. And I guess before Supermetrics, I lived about five, six years in China. So when we're talking about TikTok right now, I actually used to work at a social media management platform tech company. So we worked with a lot of these Chinese social media platforms and working with their APIs and setting them up so social media marketers in China can also plan and analyze their analytics over there.

Evan Kaeding:

I can't think of anybody more qualified to come on the show and talk with us about this. So thank you, Kristina, for making time in your day. So maybe what we can do is today is we can set the facts straight and we can give an update as of the time of recording, which is January 15th in 2025. And based on what we know, there are some pretty key timelines coming up in the not too distant future, but maybe Kris, could you give us a better understanding of what some of those deadlines are and maybe the backstory for how we got here?

Kristina Knut:

Yeah, sure. So I think the main deadline that we're all kind of anxiously looking forward to is January 19th, 2025, and nobody really knows how things will evolve until then. There's every day that I read about the story, new things keep popping up, but essentially what we're looking at on January 19th, we're expecting a TikTok ban. So TikTok will not be available in the US markets allegedly as of then. And yes, how we got here. So the concerns around TikTok began making headlines in 20, which is around the same time when India banned TikTok as well from their markets. And a lot of these concerns, they were mainly about data privacy and national security concerns. So in response, TikTok of course launched several initiatives to address these kind of concerns that lawmakers in the US had including Project Texas in 2022. So that initiative, for example, was aimed to localize US user data within America.

So they were actually partnering with Oracle to store and manage data in a secure and transparent way. But there were also talks of Microsoft perhaps acquiring TikTok, which as we all know didn't go through. But yeah, despite all of these efforts, tension still kept escalating, and I think many of us still remember the hearing of the TikTok CEO in 2023. So he was testifying before the US Congress and tried to address a lot of the concerns about data security. However, the skepticism remained and it still kind of had a lot of policymakers calling for stronger measurements against the app. And by December of last year, the US government pretty much confirmed all of our fears that the ban is set to take effect in January, 2025, which is why we are here today.

Evan Kaeding:

And so if we just look at the numbers in this case, right? So right now TikTok is operational in the US at least for the next four days. And today TikTok has about 170 million active users in the US and based on I think estimates from work and from E-marketer, they have revenues of about somewhere in the 10 to 11 billion ballpark for that market. That's a big chunk of media spend. And right now, certainly customers of ours at Supermetrics and certainly anybody who's spending media dollars on TikTok is wondering what's going to happen on January 19th. Is the media going to continue to run? Am I still going to be able to push out updates via my organic influencers? Kris, do we have any indication based on the sources that you've read or people that you've worked with on what exactly is going to be happening on January 19th?

Kristina Knut:

So it's not the first time that TikTok has been tackling with these bands. It already has happened in India as well where TikTok got banned in 2020. So we can kind of look back at what happened then and make our own kind of guesses based on that. So you will likely, if you open TikTok on January 19, it's very likely that you will still have the app on your phone. It's not going to just magically disappear. But what will happen is that if you open the app, you will likely see a prompt or a notification stating that TikTok is no longer available in the us. So that's pretty similar to what happened in India. And you will not be able to download TikTok or get any updates from the Apple App store or Google Play store. So this is because the band targets companies like Apple and Google that make TikTok accessible to users. And without these updates, users won't be able to get bug fixes or new features or security updates. So eventually the app just might become incompatible with your phone's operating system and you may not be able to use it anymore.

Evan Kaeding:

Thank you for the summary. And what exactly does that look like for advertisers? Do we have a sense for if media is going to continue to run on this app that users can no longer download, will TikTok continue to be a brand safe environment for advertisers to run either paid or organic campaigns in? Are there any learnings that we can take from India or other parts of the world where this has happened?

Kristina Knut:

So that I am unfortunately not that certain of, and I don't think anybody really can say anything with massive safety or guarantee. So I think the only thing that we can do is just guess. I guess it's kind of hard to say. It really depends on how the regulations will turn out, even if the app is going to be there, will there be the functionalities in terms of launching any kind of ads? Another thing is that will there be support people or account people still left on the TikTok side. I mean obviously these threats of the app closing down has kind of also influenced the morale within TikTok. So you never know. We can't really make any guarantees.

Evan Kaeding:

It certainly seems like based on recent reports that the majority of the US TikTok staff will be retained through some kind of agreement that they anticipate reaching with some regulatory body. At least that's what I've read. So if the staff is being retained, you have to imagine that there's going to be some form of business continuity plan. And I don't think that this is necessarily brand new news to TikTok either because they've been quarreling with the US government for quite some time as you've mentioned, and this has been fairly well known. So there's probably a business continuity plan, exactly what that means for users. For advertisers, I think we can probably count on a slightly degradated user experience. And for advertisers, I think we can probably anticipate that there is not going to be a significant amount of growth in the underlying usage of TikTok, and there may even be spikes in other platforms outside of the TikTok ecosystem. Do you have any thoughts on where user behavior and time might be spent if TikTok no longer becomes a viable place to spend time?

Kristina Knut:

Well, for the first few months probably people will still flock to TikTok or keep kind of hanging onto that. But what is interesting, what I've been seeing reports of is that people are hopping to another platform and it's not very widely known in the us so it's called Xiaohongshu or Red Notes. And as you can guess from the name, it is a Chinese based app. It's a very interesting hybrid between Instagram and Pinterest. So I have had an account on that platform since 2021 just to keep in touch with the trends and updates in China. So it is a completely different aesthetic. It is very female oriented user base. So it's kind of been funny opening the app in the past few days and seeing a lot of Americans who don't speak Mandarin hop on there and they're calling themselves TikTok refugees, and that's how the posts kind of start like, Hey, I'm new here, I don't understand what's going on.

I'm using ChatGPT or Google Translate to get an understanding of what's going on here. So I think it's been really fun and chaotic couple of days where Chinese internet users who perhaps haven't been able to access Instagram or even our TikTok because they have their own version of it, which is called doin, where they have this kind of crossover that has never really happened before. So it's been fun. One thing I would like to note about this migration over to Red Note or Xiaohongshu, particularly for brands, is to hold your horses. It's been literally just a few days. So if your brand is not on Honshu already, then probably wait it out. And why, I mean already that actually a lot of Western brands are on Xiaohongshu. It is still a big marketing channel and many Western brands do have their Chinese operations in China. So of course if you're already there, that's great. If you're not there, then hold your horses. It's not really that easy to get on as a brand. The app operates in completely different ways. So let's focus on the platforms that we have currently available in the West.

Evan Kaeding:

It certainly sounds like it, and I think when we look at the space that TikTok occupies in the US media landscape overall with the consumption of news and with the just sheer amount of reach that it has across key demographics for advertisers, particularly in under 18 segments in to 25 and several others, there aren't a lot of other platforms that necessarily offer that degree of reach. So I have to imagine that advertisers are going to be wondering what are the different ways that I can actually effectively reach that audience going forward? And moreover, what are the different ways that for advertisers who are heavily invested in TikTok and have a strong organic presence and maybe are complimenting that with a strong paid presence, what do their business continuity plans look like? And I know that from the Supermetrics standpoint, we certainly have some thoughts on what that looks like, but maybe Kris, if you could share a couple of things that you're keeping in mind, certainly for us in our presence in TikTok as a B2B SaaS company, I think that'd be a good way to maybe start the discussion around what we can do on that side to maybe provide some guidance for how to navigate this tumultuous time.

Kristina Knut:

Yeah, so it's interesting because we are based out of Europe, so nothing will really change for us with the app. TikTok will still be available for us. All the updates will be still available for us. I think looking at our user base as well, it is heavily leaning to Nordic countries, at least here for TikTok. Whenever I check the stats, I do think it's good to have a presence over there and engage with our US audiences there as well. But again, for us, nothing will really change. However, I think for the first, again, few months as the app will just, the main change that will happen is that it's just not available on the app store and you're just not going to get any crucial updates, just continue doing as is. But at the same time, kind of start thinking about what other channels do you have that are popular or within your ICPs or target audiences. I think also communicating that to your audience and fan base on TikTok, where can they find you once TikTok becomes unusable, that will be a great first step.

Evan Kaeding:

Yeah, definitely. And I have to imagine that for a European specifically Nordic based B2B SaaS brand, this is certainly not an existential crisis for us, right? It is something that will be a bump in the road, but it's certainly something that for the majority of our customers and our users, there'll be able to find us in other channels. And I am certainly hopeful that TikTok and its user base and its teams will be able to find an amenable solution with the US government for the purposes of continuing what ultimately has been a great run from a media and platform perspective, but for other advertisers, things are not maybe perhaps as easy. And when it comes to the investments that advertisers are currently making in TikTok and the data that they have already on the platform based on the performance of their creatives, their organic, they're influencers, those are all things that we can give at least a little bit of guidance on from the super metrics perspective.

So I've spoken on the Marketing Intelligence Show a couple of times with some really influential people in the media measurement space, notably Olivia Kory from Haus, Andrew Covato from Growth by Science, Michael Kaminsky from Recast, all who have their own takes on media measurement. And one thing they certainly all agree on is that getting access to and maintaining your historical data for many platform becomes key to measuring the impact of any individual media platform on your overall results. Whether you're selling a consumer goods product through retailers or whether you're selling something online, getting access to that historical data is what allows you to build your marketing data foundation upon which you can then use different kinds of marketing measurement techniques like marketing mix modeling, and also known as MMM or most notably incrementality studies. And in fact, what might actually be very interesting for many advertisers is this may represent to some extent a big incrementality study where essentially you have one channel that for all intents and purposes, let's call it, goes dark, and then you'll actually be able to see what is the incremental value that that channel is adding to your brand health statistics, to your online conversions, to your in-store visits or to your overall sales uplift.

Now, there are no guarantees that you'll continue to be able to buy ads on TikTok. There are also no guarantees that you will not be able to buy ads on TikTok. So should you choose to, if you have the option, continue buying media, which again, we have no recommendation whether or not that is a good idea or is not a good idea. Officially, on this podcast, it's going to be very interesting for you to look at the stats, certainly on content engagement, but also on media performance relative to what you've seen in the past. Now, storing that data year over year becomes really powerful because we're moving into a couple of really key seasonal events over the course of the next couple of weeks, couple of months as well. Number one being the lunar New Year, which is celebrated very widely, certainly in the APAC region.

And number two being Valentine's Day being really one of the biggest days of the year for several different brands out there. And of course, comparing the engagement metrics that you're seeing on TikTok to the previous year is going to be a lot more effective of a comparison than comparing it to the pre dark versus post dark period that we're about to be entering. Allegedly, this could all change over the course of the next couple of days based on any kinds of deal that gets any kinds of deals that get worked out between the regulators and the leadership at TikTok. So those are certainly some of the things that I see as being, I suppose, a silver lining, if you could call it that, is you get the opportunity to understand what is TikTok's true incrementality to my, you get the opportunity to really put some of that historical data that you may have already been collecting to use. And third, you get to also experiment perhaps with other ways of reaching that same audience. Of course, as mentioned, TikTok is an important part of the media ecosystem, and we certainly hope for a successful resolution, but should things go dark in whatever way, they may go on January 19th coming up in just a couple of days. Advertisers have dollars to spend, they have customers to acquire, and they have people to influence, and that's really what we want to help them do in whatever way is possible.

Kristina Knut:

I would also like to add that since it is a developing story, and we're talking about January 19th as the impeding going dark day, the recent news that I've been seeing is that there has been a proposal to postpone the ban for another 270 days. So again, we don't know if that has been accepted yet, but again, there is many things and many ways that can happen, the story can develop. So just wanted to mention that.

Evan Kaeding:

Of course. Yeah, it's speculative at best based on what's going to happen and based on the information we know, we certainly don't have any insight information here at Supermetrics, but we have been privy to a number of different opinions based on what we've seen in the news, and we're working with advertisers on understanding the effect of this event on their media and their advertising plans for 2025. But with that, Kris, anything else you want to leave the audience with before we wrap up here?

Kristina Knut:

Yes, so of course we're talking a lot about advertising point of view and what to do with that. I would also kind of like to think about organic side of things, which is of course, I think the algorithm of TikTok is just incredible, and it's been a massive unlock for a lot of small brands. So of course for them, this is particularly tragic that perhaps you are not working with this massive budgets. It's going to be maybe a little bit harder to find that kind of reach organically on other channels. Of course, that's a loss of the valuable marketing channel impact on influencer marketing. We don't even know about that. What's going to happen there. I think there's a lot of UGC creators that are, again, with their massive audience basis on TikTok that perhaps they don't have on other channels. So what's going to happen to them?

What is it going to mean for brands and how they're going to continue working with these UGC creators? So definitely if you are working with any UGC partners or creators on TikTok, just reach out to them and understand how to navigate. Maybe you should move that spend to any other channels that they already have as well. But thinking about the social media manager like survival strategy over the next few days, I think a few things that you definitely should be doing is downloading your user data. Anything that you've done so far, which is kind of what Evan already mentioned. Another thing is download all of your existing content from the app just in case you never know. But having that backup is very important. Definitely. I think it's also kind of thinking that even if you have this content available and whatever plans that you had for TikTok, we can't overlook the impact that TikTok has had on other social media platforms over the past few years.

So you may think that, okay, this channel is gone, but a lot of the things that you've been doing so far on TikTok, you can continue doing that on YouTube shorts, you can do it on Instagram reels. Even LinkedIn has brought in this vertical video feed into their app. So again, you're going to lose out perhaps on TikTok, but use it as an opportunity to maybe look into other channels that you can grow, just because TikTok has been so successful, every other social media platform has been building their own little TikTok features onto their app. So again, a lot of that content just works on other platforms. I think also, as I said earlier, just make sure that your audience knows where to find you on other channels. So building out that strong community. Maybe there's other marketing channels that you also want to consider your newsletters. Again, that is completely owned by you. You can always have that audience with you and retain them no matter what, and just stay informed and watch the news and kind of understand where this is developing. Because again, I think by the time that this podcast actually comes out, we're going to have 10 new updates on this developing story.

Evan Kaeding:

It certainly could be the case. We'll be sure to keep our editors busy. I have no doubt. Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Kristina for joining us on the podcast. I hope you had fun.

Kristina Knut:

This was definitely fun. Thank you so much, Evan.

Evan Kaeding:

It's been a pleasure having you. Much appreciated. Bye-bye.

Kristina Knut:

Good luck to all the marketers.

Edward Ford:

Thank you for listening to the Marketing Intelligence Show brought to you by Supermetrics. If you're enjoying the podcast, then we'd love for you to tap that subscribe button, leave a review, and share with your colleagues and peers. We'll see you in the next episode.