In this opinion piece Sabri Suby, founder and head of growth at King Kong, shares his opinion on speculation that the Australian government could ban TikTok.
I’m not surprised some Australian politicians are jumping on the bandwagon as the US currently considers banning TikTok. Liberal senator James Paterson has said that the platform is unsafe and Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce has compared having TikTok on our phones to having a spy “in our pocket.”
These comments are contributing to fearmongering among the public, and do impact confidence in brands’ advertising.
In Australia, there are 350,000 businesses and more than 8.5 million users on TikTok, so any crackdown on the app will have a massive impact on business – big and small. In the US alone, TikTok generated an estimated $US6 billion (AUD $9.1 billion) in advertising revenue last year.
For businesses today, if you’re good at storytelling, you can blow up online through social media and TikTok has come in and really changed the game, becoming the number one organic channel in the world right now. You can literally go from zero to hero in 3 months on TikTok, and countless businesses are great examples of this.
On TikTok, there is really no limit to the people you can push your message to. The number of eyeballs you’re willing to pay for is the only limit of how hard you can push out your marketing message. Globally, this is only going to continue, so Aussie businesses will be missing out on reaching those international audiences if they can’t use TikTok.
What are our alternatives? Search marketing only represents a very small percentage of the overall marketing pie, because there are only so many searches per month for what it is that you’re selling. So, in reality, it’s quite limited.
And as always, push traffic to your owned assets. Social media sites are never going to touch your email marketing lists, your text messaging lists, or your website. Whatever marketing strategy you use on social, always push your audience to the assets that you own, every time.
Brands should never put themselves in a position where their social media strategy is just reacting to the latest scaremongering happening in the media. Don’t look at what is changing, but what is not going to change. People are going to continue to spend more and more time online, and they’re always going to have it as a part of their lives.
