How TikTok’s Ban Will Affect Your Website Traffic

TikTok has been one of the most relevant, popular, and trending social media platforms that managed to gain a whopping 500 million active monthly users within a year. It took the world by a storm where we witnessed many brands and businesses hopping on to TikTok for better web traffic and an elevated audience reach.

TikTok will certainly go down as one of the most controversial apps in the history of social media. Today, it faces a ban in the United States and India due to implicitly raised security concerns following the allegations that China uses the app as a surveillance tool to spy on the citizens and to accumulate data. The TikTok ban has majorly dampened the revenues of content creators worldwide. But what does it mean for brands and influencer marketing?

As TikTok exploded from nowhere to become one of the most downloaded apps globally, marketers and brand advertisers picked up on the emerging trend. Many businesses started associating their brands with TikTok influencers to spread their content to a wider audience. Companies who decided to get on TikTok optimized their following much quicker as compared to other platforms they were using and with minimal capital.

The TikTok algorithm considers the performance of interactions on the videos rather than the channel history which served as a major distinctive element that separated TikTok from other social media platforms. Brands had to do less to get their content out to a larger audience. Brand custodians placed TikTok on one of the top three influencer marketing platforms. Despite having a relatively younger demographic, TikTok managed to get an overall high engagement rate across the population.

In India, it enabled brands to pull the audience from tier-one and tier-three cities, which was previously a challenge for most businesses. There was a major shift where brands moved on from mega influencers like Facebook and YouTube to micro-influencers on TikTok. While there are many replacements for TikTok, people in smaller markets will definitely find it unwieldy to regenerate the following of the same caliber on another platform.

As a business owner, eventually, it is the consumer’s attention you are after, and if you’ve managed to maintain a loyal and steady flow of audience over the years, it is likely that people will find you despite any social media ban. Your focus should always be on attention. Where does the actual attention reside and how can you advertise on that platform?

The volatile nature of these social media platforms will make brands acknowledge the importance of divergence and why it is important to have a presence on multiple platforms and create contextual content for each one. Whether the government shuts down the platform or the consumers shift to something else, putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t a smart approach in the present climate. Brands need to create and spread content across the board in order to win the long game.