Whether it comes back or not.
(This seems like something I’d more commonly post on Ask Leo!, but it feels a tad off-target for my audience there, so here it is in my personal blog. Enjoy. 
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As I first wrote this, the TikTok platform was no longer accessible in the United States. It’s since returned, at least temporarily. For how long we don’t know. 90 days? Longer? Permanently? Who knows?
TikTok allowed for the rise of what I’ll call the “accidental entrepreneur”. These are folks who began posting for fun, and then gained popularity to the point of generating enough revenue to be a small business. Several even quit their day jobs in favor of content creation on TikTok. It’s an awesome story.
Unfortunately, though, some of them are learning a hard lesson today. It’s a lesson every online business person needs to learn, and be periodically reminded of.
To be clear, this isn’t just about TikTok. This is about any service you rely on exclusively. Don’t assume it’ll always be there. It’s extremely risky to build a business or hobby relying on any single platform or service and assuming it’ll be around forever.
It won’t be.
Just ask people who put all their energies into MySpace, Yahoo Groups, FourSquare, GeoCities, and so many others. The internet is littered with once promising “too big to fail” platforms that just aren’t around, or aren’t anything close to what they once were. While TikTok’s “failure mode” is unique, being banned in the US, it’s another example of how things can go disastrously wrong.
Alternatives
To be clear, I’m not saying don’t post on those platforms. Those “accidental entrepreneurs” wouldn’t be where they are without TikTok, and I wouldn’t take that away from anyone.
What I’m saying is don’t rely on those platforms. There’s a subtle difference.
The safest approach, which many TikTokers have been doing, more and more so in recent weeks, is to be in multiple places. For them, that’s typically meant posting to Instagram, YouTube, and/or others, in addition to TikTok.
For you, it might mean posting on your own blog or a primary platform, and then on one or more other platforms.
Keep the originals
Above all, keep your own copies of all your work. Save them on your phone, back them up to your computer, whatever it takes.
Don’t upload and delete. If you lose your account for any reason, say it’s compromised or stolen, or the platform just decides they don’t like you — or it gets banned — then you could lose all access to everything, with no recourse.
Imagine the service you rely on disappearing one morning. What would you do? How would you carry on? If you still have your originals, you have options.
Keep the originals.
Revenue
These platforms, of course, aren’t created equal, especially for revenue or livelihood opportunities.
This has been clear with TikTok. Some creators have been making significant income to degrees just not possible, at least right now, on the other platforms. Either through “for you” exposure, or general audience growth, the platform seems to make growth easier than other alternatives.
If you’re making most of your revenue on a single platform, think long and hard about how you’ll survive if that platform goes away. Doing the same thing on a different platform might not work, and even if it would, you’ll probably have to start your audience building over. What worked in one place is likely not to be as successful elsewhere.
This is something many TikTokers are just now learning.
Diversify
One thing I’ve seen some creators do is to add different things to their portfolio. It’s common, for example, to see them promoting their merchandise (“merch”) as an additional revenue stream. Membership / patronage opportunities can be lucrative. Educational creators can create online courses or publish books.
if this has become your business or calling it’s important to realize you don’t need to keep doing only the same thing in the same place forever. Experiment. See what works, and see what works where.
Complacency puts you at greater risk.
When “your own” isn’t practical
I’m fortunate, in that I post my content on a website completely under my control, first. That’s “on your own” to an extreme. I can then share or post that content in other venues, as I see fit.
But that’s not a path for everyone. If that’s you, there are at least two things you should consider:
- Post your content in more than one place. Prioritize one, if you like, in timing or exposure, but have at least two. Perhaps even consider three. Many TikTokers have been doing this in recent weeks: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. That specific trio is great, as it’s not only three separate places, but three separate parent companies. If one goes away, your audience can still find you .
- If you earn revenue from your content that you rely on, start thinking about alternate revenue streams now. Be it merch, or ad revenue on other platforms, or memberships, or whatever you come up with, get them set up soon. Unless you’re completely OK with losing out on revenue if your most successful platform goes away suddenly, build out that backup plan.
OK, there’s a third thing.
- Back up. All that content you create, regardless of its form, is valuable. Make certain that you have it, and have it backed up in a way that you can recover from any potential disaster ranging from your phone bricking, to your favorite platform being banned in your country.
A word about email
One of the ways that most social media platforms lock you in is by making their platform the only way you can communicate with your followers. There’s almost never a way to export a list of followers in any meaningful way.
This has been true since before the growth of social media.
The solution is one thing I wished I’d done myself, much earlier. Email.
Specifically, start sharing some (or perhaps all) of your content via an email mailing list. Encourage all of your followers to sign up. Particularly since we can’t rely on “the algorithm” on any platform to actually show your content to the people that follow you, email is a great way to keep the relationship active.
“Thanks to The Algorithm, you’re missing many of my posts” is a great way to encourage people to remain in contact in a way that remains yours no matter what happens to the platforms you use.
I know it’s old school, and I know it’s not something everyone believes in, but it’s most definitely the one thing I wish I would have done sooner.
Thank you Leo! Will forward to a friend with a blog and a couple of books she has published in small numbers. She may well profit (money or not) from your advice. I’m also with a political group assessing communications–with an emphasis on security–but I’ll send this along to our tech group. Not sure they have wanted to use social media but if we do at some point these are good things to remember. We did question: do you see email as secure (from prying eyes that might mean us harm?) Already shifted texting to Signal. Though at this point we are using a gmail address. Any thoughts? Thanks again!
Email is not secure. Of course how much of a problem that is depends on what kind of a target you represemt.
Email is generally sent in plain text. While server-to-server connections are encrypted these days, the email sits on each server unencrypted. Anyone with access to the server can read. For most people it’s not an issue (I don’t care, for example), but for some it’s an important thing to understand.
Feel free to contact me directly, if you like, and I can ask a few more questions and perhaps make a recommendation or two.