I've written before about the regulatory whiplash and the cluster of confusion and expense it creates for big manufacturing companies when they don't know how to prepare. They hedge their bets that things remain as they are which (for the time it was written before Trump was elected) are more stringent and more costly to comply with. I don't see a difference between issues big businesses face as different from the ones small businesses face - compliance is compliance and confusion about what may happen happens no matter what.
Here is how TikTok influencers/small businesses should have been preparing...and most did not.
The second that a ban was floated as a talking point, they should have secured their pages on alternative social media platforms, researched them in advance, and familiarized themselves with the app or site functions. They kept on thinking it wasn't serious or it wasn't going to go through. Little did they know, it was not going to be up for floor debate but rather put in a must-pass spending bill to keep the government open.
But wait: there's still time! There's still a chance it won't happen!
Cue up a Supreme Court hail mary pass (didn't work), a last minute bill to keep it alive (didn't work), and praying on executive orders (one kicked it to the next administration, the second will likely only delay the ban). Content creators only started taking measured actions to secure their audiences in the final two weeks, promoting other platforms they were already on or on new ones they didn't previously have an account for. Problems?
1) enterprising individuals who were not the content creators went to the other platforms and took their names. It's not at all dissimilar from people taking a webpage name with the intent of selling it at a much higher price than they paid for it to the person who would want it legitimately.
2) many people ran to RedNote, which is 100% run by the Chinese who would keep their data. Privacy protections would be non-existent as well. It is rumored RedNote has plans to respond by creating a wall around US-located IPs so its existing users couldn't access that content (which has VPNs salivating to boost their business). And freedom of speech...on a Chinese-run app built for Chinese people? Mmkay.
There is a lot of frustration with billionaire-owned app alternatives (Instagram is Meta [Zuckerberg], X [Twitter] is Musk). YouTube is not owned by either of those two and with its shorts feature, it is a close fallback to TikTok. TikTok was definitely different from the others. I had a viral post on TikTok reach 116,000 views. Same video on Instagram garnered a mere 228 views. A video with 8,000 views on TikTok got 68 views on Instagram. Go figure, but it shows there was a reason TikTok was being held on so strongly.
Odds are the RedNote will be a short-lived run. The creators will find something less burdensome. It's sad for me to see them on Instagram venting their frustrations about scrambling to move their key business content elsewhere and hoping their followers follow them.
I'd been contemplating a YouTube channel for some time (over a year) having nothing to do with the ban - more to do with the data about the audience I'd like to reach. You know how long it took me to secure my channel on YouTube under the name I wanted? Less than 60 seconds. Have I decided to do something with it yet? Maybe. It will look sort of different from my TikToks...which I just recycled for Instagram.
I have the luxury of not relying on social media for my income...but it didn't stop me from being prepared just in case. Turns out I did have a way to help online influences with business continuity aside from making sure their hardware and connections work and have backups
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