Is there life after TikTok?
The query is entrance of thoughts for U.S. influencers and plenty of small companies as lawmakers threaten to ban the Chinese-owned social media app that’s turn out to be a cornerstone of internet culture and e-commerce.
For a solution, they could flip to India, which has been surviving without TikTok since June 2020.
That month, after 20 of its troopers were killed in a border conflict with China, the Indian authorities gave TikTok customers a day to submit tearful goodbyes and steer followers to different social media accounts. Then the app went dark.
People gentle candles in Hyderabad on June 17, 2020, in tribute to the 20 troopers killed throughout a border conflict between Indian and Chinese forces within the Ladakh area.
(Mahesh Kumar A / Associated Press)
“When it got banned, I had nothing,” recalled Gaurav Jain, who was one of the country’s greater than 200 million TikTok customers.
He was 25 and had simply notched his millionth follower making self-help movies about psychological well being, males’s model and relationships.
Four years later, Jain runs his personal social media advertising and marketing company in Delhi, managing Indian content material creators who pivoted to different platforms or joined the influencer world extra just lately. He had tried to make the transition himself however discovered ranging from scratch demoralizing.
“The counter became zero for everyone,” he stated. “That gave rise to a lot of new creators.”
The outcomes for former TikTok stars have been combined.
Gautan Madhavan, founder of Mad Influence, a advertising and marketing company that managed greater than 300 content material creators earlier than the TikTok ban, stated that a couple of third of them had been capable of recapture their attain on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts inside three months and that many are nonetheless taking part in catch-up.
Those short-video platforms launched shortly after the TikTok ban. Users who discovered success bought in early and posted as typically as 10 occasions a day, in keeping with Saptarshi Ray, a marketing consultant for influencers attempting to develop their followings.
“Most of them were just trying everything,” Ray stated. “Those were the creators that really flourished.”
Activists shout slogans towards Chinese President Xi Jinping subsequent to a banner displaying the logos of TikTok and different Chinese apps banned in India throughout a protest in Jammu, India, on July 1, 2020.
(Channi Anand / Associated Press)
India was TikTok’s quickest rising consumer base earlier than the ban, which reduce off a significant supply of earnings for creators there.
The stakes are even higher within the United States, the place the app has greater than 170 million customers, together with 7 million businesses that TikTok says generated $14.7 billion in income final 12 months from advertising and marketing on the platform. The Pew Research Center discovered {that a} third of Americans used TikTok final 12 months, up from a fifth in 2021.
In April, President Biden signed a bill to ban the app by January 2025, except Chinese father or mother firm ByteDance Ltd. agrees to sells the app to any person from a country that’s not thought of a international adversary.
The risk comes as suspicion between the U.S. and China has escalated, reviving issues that TikTok may share delicate knowledge with the Chinese authorities.
The proposed ban nonetheless faces excessive hurdles. Both TikTok and a gaggle of U.S. content material creators individually filed lawsuits, arguing that blocking the app could be an unconstitutional assault on free speech. The Trump administration had also tried to ban TikTok however gave up after being challenged by federal courts.
TikTok has sought to assure the U.S. authorities that consumer knowledge is protected on U.S. servers. And although its father or mother firm relies in Beijing, TikTok moved operations to Singapore underneath a Singaporean chief government.
The U.S. — together with Britain and Australia — has already prohibited the use of TikTok on authorities units. But digital advertising and marketing specialists stated many U.S. customers are nonetheless not severely contemplating the chance of a ban.
A person demonstrates exterior the courthouse in New York the place the hush cash trial of Donald Trump bought underway on April 15, 2024.
(Ted Shaffrey / Associated Press)
“I don’t think the average TikTok user has synthesized in their brain that this is going away,” stated Lawrence Vincent, affiliate professor of the follow of advertising and marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. “They’ve heard about it, but it isn’t real until it’s real.”
There has been little anticipatory migration to different platforms. But former TikTokers in India suggested their American counterparts to arrange for the worst.
“We used to hear rumors about this happening, but we never really believed it,” stated Ashi Khanna, a 26-year-old influencer from Delhi.
She launched her TikTok career by posting lip-synching movies in 2017 — when the app was referred to as Music.ly — and ultimately constructed a following of 1.7 million. She managed to submit a farewell directing them to Instagram and YouTube, the place she already had smaller followings. But fewer than 20,000 did so.
Since then, Khanna has focused on Instagram and managed to match her outdated following.
In distinction to TikTok, which by no means positioned a premium on manufacturing high quality, Instragram required a extra polished aesthetic that would imply spending hours on a single reel.
“There’s a huge difference,” Khanna stated. “You need to understand what your audience likes, and your audience is not the same on every platform.”
Ankita Chhetri, 22, who lives in Mumbai, stated experimentation was the important thing to life past TikTok.
She became TikTok famous in 2019 after posting a video of herself lip-synching to a preferred Bollywood track. With 8.2 million followers, she earned promotional offers with music labels and scrapped her plans to be a nurse in hopes of making it as an influencer and actor.
After the ban, she began a YouTube channel and branched out from lip-synching into fastidiously deliberate reels of magnificence, journey, vogue and inspirational quotes. As she step by step elevated her following to 1.6 million, she used her improved engagement statistics to pitch manufacturers on potential partnerships.
Still, Chhetri stated there are occasions she misses the outdated days.
“TikTok just had some crazy amount of loyalty among audiences,” she stated. “On Instagram, even if people are watching and liking your content, they’re still hesitant to press that follow button.”
Indian entrepreneurs created their very own variations of TikTok, however did not get a lot of an viewers.
“It still felt like I was invisible, nobody was really there,” stated Shreyas Mendiratta, a 23-year-old hospital employee who posted his comedy movies on Indian startup apps for just a few months earlier than giving up. “On TikTok, I felt seen, I felt heard.”
Geet Jain data herself for social media.
(Courtesy of Geet Jain)
His movies don’t do as well on Instagram and YouTube both, which he urged lack TikTok’s broad worldwide enchantment.
“It reduces the chances of them going global,” he stated. “This is what I face on Instagram daily. I am very restricted to the region that I am geographically located in.”
Geet Jain, an inspirational speaker and English trainer, was visiting the U.S. when India banned TikTok. She may nonetheless use the app, however none of her 7 million followers in India may see her posts providing relationship recommendation, comedy bits and English classes.
“It was like this whirlwind of confusion of what do I do next,” stated Jain, who declined to supply her age.
She turned to Instagram, rising 68,000 followers into 1.3 million. But she by no means achieved the identical variety of exponential growth. Some of her TikTok fans had a troublesome time discovering her.
Back within the U.S. this 12 months for an prolonged keep together with her sister in Seattle, she has began posting on TikTok as soon as extra.
English lesson from Geet Jain on social media (Courtesy of Geet Jain)
But she now not is aware of what viewers want. Clips have gotten longer, with extra casually narrated tales and fewer dancing and lip-synching than she remembers. There is extra competitors on the subject of her model of instructional content material.
While some of her English-language movies have gotten traction, she’s reluctant to invest too heavily in TikTok once more.
“If it gets banned in America, it will be even more devastating for me,” she stated. “Then my accounts are actually gone.”
