The US is banning TikTok! Why you should pay attention.

The TikTok ban just passed in the US. What does that mean for people like you and me? Well for one, it’s highlighting the fact that if all of your marketing and business building strategy is invested in social media you’re vulnerable. 

I wasn’t even paying attention to this to be honest but it’s perfect timing. Our last call inside The Sovereign CEO focused on exactly THIS. Building a strategy outside of social media. It’s not that social media isn’t valuable, it is, it’s that it’s….

• Time consuming
• Distracting 
• Limited in that the content only reaches so many and only briefly 

If you were going to make an investment would you trust someone that said you should put 100% of your money into a certain stock? Of course you wouldn’t. Well putting 100% of your effort into social media (especially just one platform) is that same scenario. 

Marketing on social media isn’t free. It’s your time and THAT is more valuable than anything. I’ve worked with many clients with 30-100k followings built on one social media platform. The first thing we do is get them to start building elsewhere so we have more legs on our strategy body. 

There are so many other strategies that you could focus on to grow your business. 

• Building a strong lead funnel connected to an ad
• Podcasting and using your own services/products as the paid sponsor 
• In person networking events 
• Building a youtube channel and working towards monetization 
• Writing a blog that connects to Pinterest 
• Collaborating on Linkedin 
• Doing community outreach and asking if you could host workshops in other people’s spaces 
• Creating really good freebies and service based content that grows your email list 

The list is endless. You don’t have to do it all but you should start thinking about getting all of your eggs out of the social media strategy basket. 

 Here’s what I think will happen next...

1. TikTok content creators are going to flood other platforms. The app isn’t fully banned (yet) but it scared the pants off a lot of creators who weren’t diversified yet 
2. Other countries will follow (India banned TikTok in 2020 and it took 4 years for the US to follow) so it’s very likely that other countries will follow this trend.
3. There are going to be big discussions about other apps here too. We already know censorship is a problem here in Canada and we don’t own our audiences or our content. 

The good news? 

This is your chance to shine, to rise up as the leader and visionary that you were meant to be. This is your invitation to stop playing small and creating content solely for “the gram” and start creating pivotal long form content like blogs, youtube videos, substacks. 

This is your invitation to become masterful at what you do and to start doing the bigger work that you know you’ve been called to do. To make the online course, to start the podcast, to build those free programs you’ve been saying you’re going to create. 

And practically, there’s also a good chance that you’ll receive more engagement on other non-tiktok platforms as users will be making their way to other platforms like Instagram. 

Does this mean social media platforms are disappearing? No. The Tiktok ban is your wake up call to boss up, be strategic and to make sure that you have a bigger strategy for your brand and business than simply posting content on one platform.

Things are always changing. Be adaptable and pivot and you’ll always be a radical success.

Listen to the podcast episode I recorded on this exact topic here: