With lawmakers from both major US political parties calling for a ban on TikTok, many small business owners are worried about how that may impact their future.
A growing number of businesses rely heavily on social media platforms to help them reach and connect with their target audience. So, a ban may remove a significant marketing channel for many. More worrying still is the fact that some businesses make the majority, or even totality, of their sales via social media storefronts. For these businesses, a TikTok ban may be even more serious.
TechRadar Pro spoke to Amy Jennette, Sr. Director, Integrated Marketing at GoDaddy about what the potential ban may mean for small businesses and how using one of the best website builders may be a smart way to protect yourself against it.
You can read our full GoDaddy website builder review here.
Amy Jennette is a marketing leader with a passion for empowering entrepreneurs and transforming brands. She is Senior Director of Marketing at GoDaddy, where she oversees the U.S. integrated marketing go-to-market strategy. Since joining GoDaddy, Amy has launched several impactful campaigns that have boosted GoDaddy's brand reputation and customer engagement. She was behind GoDaddy's first-ever brand campaign, Make the World You Want, which showcased the diverse and inspiring stories of GoDaddy customers. She also led the brand transformation, including the GoDaddy mark and the #OpenWeStand movement, which mobilized 70+ partners to support small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, she spearheaded the Power Your Future campaign, which launched the all-new GoDaddy Airo Ai-powered experience.
TikTok is just a social media app - right? So why are small businesses so concerned about a potential ban in the US?
For many small businesses, TikTok is one of the main ways to connect and transact with their customers. TikTok's ban could have major repercussions for small businesses that rely on it as a platform to sell online, which is leaving many entrepreneurs uncertain where to turn.
How big is this problem? How many businesses could be impacted by a TikTok ban?
According to TikTok’s Economic Impact Report 2024, the platform generated $14.7B for US small businesses last year, so the potential ban could clearly have a significant effect, especially to the bottom line of those businesses that depend heavily on TikTok.
Entrepreneurs should not rely too heavily on any one social media platform or marketplace since doing so limits the audience reach and also puts small businesses at the mercy of those platforms—its policy changes, payout terms, algorithm alterations, and even, in this case, a potential ban.
Congress has offered Bytedance an ultimatum - either sell to a non-Chinese company or face a US ban - if the company decides to sell, are all our concerns over?
If TikTok does sell, there are a lot of short-term and long-term factors that could affect its future.
What we do know is it highlights the dangers for small businesses that rely too heavily on one platform. TikTok’s future is uncertain, but whatever the outcome, GoDaddy will always advocate for small businesses, which is why we’re encouraging entrepreneurs to create their own piece of digital real estate - a website.
Check out our guide to the best small business website builders.
Ok, so what can small businesses be doing right now to prepare for a potential ban?
Websites are a way to legitimize a small business and tell the full story of who they are in a way that social media cannot.
Small businesses should always be working to build relationships with potential customers that extend beyond a single social media or marketplace platform. A simple and reliable way to do this would be to create a website so they have a permanent “address” online to direct their current social media followers to find their business.
Websites are a way to legitimize a small business and tell the full story of who they are in a way that social media cannot. They allow entrepreneurs to showcase their offering the way the business owner imagines and highlight why a potential customer should do business with them instead of their competition through dynamic content like imagery and video. Websites can also be fully customized to reflect the small businesses’ brand, values, and promotional calendars, providing a space to transact directly and even leverage SEO to reach more of their target audience.
For some small business owners, building a website can seem intimidating, but tools such as GoDaddy Airo™ allow entrepreneurs to quickly and easily create a professional website with the help of AI, by simply answering a few questions. A website can connect small businesses to all the various channels where they want to show up, including social media platforms, but as an entrepreneur wants to grow, a website can support them in doing that better than a social media account alone.
Interested in using AI to build your website? Check our guide to the best AI website builders.
Social media has grown in popularity for businesses due to favorable algorithms that are typically easier to crack than the super-competitive search engine rankings game. Is this still the case? What can businesses be doing to help their customers find them on search engines?
For these platforms, their priority is consumer engagement and attention on the platform rather than the goals of the small businesses.
Social media platforms are constantly evolving and while certain platforms may currently have favorable algorithms for small businesses, these are always subject to change.
For example, Instagram recently announced advantageous changes to its “Reels” short video algorithm that will provide smaller, original creators, such as small business owners, more distribution and decrease the weight previously put on having a large number of followers. While this positively impacts entrepreneurs, it demonstrates that those algorithms have not always been favorable, and other tweaks can potentially limit their visibility and bury their content. For these platforms, their priority is consumer engagement and attention on the platform rather than the goals of the small businesses.
With a website, small business owners can develop an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to help drive traffic to their website by targeting the right audience almost automatically without the need to create new content daily.
What about other social platforms? Should businesses still be leaning on the likes of Instagram and Snapchat as part of their marketing strategies? Do you believe these platforms see a resurgence following a TikTok ban?
At the end of the day, it’s not about being on a specific platform, it’s about being where your customers are.
Social media absolutely has a role to play for small businesses looking to connect with and grow their customer base. Before investing time and resources into social media, it is important for businesses to first take a step back and understand their target audience – who they are aiming to sell to and where those potential customers interact. At the end of the day, it’s not about being on a specific platform, it’s about being where your customers are. For some small businesses, that may mean dialing up the number of Reels they produce on Instagram but for others, it may mean being where people are searching for services or recommendations like on Nextdoor.
According to a recent GoDaddy survey, there are clear differences between which social media platforms each generation uses most. For instance, Gen Z favors TikTok more than the other generations. Millennials and Gen X prefer YouTube, while baby boomers use Facebook the most. A full breakdown looks like this:
It is important for small business owners to understand there is no one-size-fits-all approach to social media marketing and doing the work on finding where your audience engages most is the first step.
It is hard to predict what will happen on the various other social media platforms following a potential TikTok ban, which is exactly why we are encouraging small businesses to establish a digital home via a website. Diversifying their platforms helps many small business owners raise awareness of the business, but all roads should lead back to a place that fully reflects them and their brand.
What are some of the challenges and pitfalls that businesses selling via social media platforms such as TikTok face? How could a shift towards an ecommerce website help overcome these?
Being beholden to one platform is risky because the policies, rates or algorithms could change, affecting a business. Building a lasting relationship with existing customers creates repeat business opportunities.
Our survey found that the overwhelming majority of Gen Z (80%) and Millennials (75%) said it is important for small businesses to have storefronts linked to their social pages for easy shopping, but small businesses are primarily using their social accounts for brand awareness over sales—only 25% use social to sell physical products and 19% to sell digital products. Using social media can be an effective marketing strategy, but many entrepreneurs are not using it as a direct selling channel.
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Having a website not only allows small businesses to tell their story the way they want, it allows them to keep more of the profits, avoiding fees that social media platforms may charge to sell on their channels. Owning a website gives better control of sales, providing more consistent and quicker payouts. Websites also offer small businesses the opportunity to build lasting relationships with existing customers, creating repeat business opportunities.
