To friends, colleagues, clients, and my mom (!) who are very worried about the TikTok ban — I owe it to you to send out a POV and to share how we’re advising clients at Acadia. So here it is:
The Short Version
- We are not advising clients to move away from TikTok at the moment and do not advise sacrificing the billions of users who are very much engaged.
- We are advising clients to do a data backup, to save existing videos/reports, and to keep an eye on performance to note any dips due to the TikTok news. As always, if there's another platform that is out-performing TikTok, we would advise to shift efforts to that platform.
- We are focusing on our clients' Instagram and YouTube accounts to ensure that they are optimized should we need to move to Reels/YouTube Shorts, or another platform. For majority of our clients, we've been posting TikTok content to YouTube Shorts to build up a library in preparation for a ban.
My POV
I’ve been really optimistic for TikTok in the US until I read more about the ban in India. Poof, gone over night. As a Head of Social with many teamers and clients relying on my decisions, I am now acting as if there will be a ban to be the best steward of that marketing budget and overall client relationship. The good news? When you have worked in social media since 2013, you’re used to change. We have been at this for a decade plus. There are always shifts in attention. Threads was up and then down. Facebook was up, then down, and then back up. Remember Clubhouse? I share this not to be flippant, but rather to say, we will help our clients migrate and find the attention wherever it goes.
My team has been spending time not only on the articles coming out daily, but on the platform itself. Influencers like James Charles have posted asking “Where will you go if there’s a TikTok ban?”. 5 million views and 10,000 comments later, we learned that Neptune is a contender, but you know what else we learned? Influencers are going to be a huge driver for which platforms users will flock to should this ban go into effect. One comment said “We’ll go where you go!” The response? “You can catch me on my Instagram page”. So much of these moments depend on human behavior, and we’ll be watching that, too.
More soon on the topic as we learn over the coming days.