04:16
‘I think there might be a bias’: Young Americans address China fears amid potential TikTok ban
For some, TikTok is a path to riches and the American dream. With a ban, it could all disappear
- Some US lawmakers are pushing to ban the popular short-video app TikTok, which has over 150 million American users
- A ban of TikTok would be a devastating blow to many US small businesses that have turned to the app to reach potential customers
When Lauren Wyman felt crushed under the weight of her corporate finance job in 2019, she found solace in launching a small goth and alternative clothing business.
She initially made Facebook and Instagram accounts for her shop, Dark Mother Clothing, but generated only US$5,000 to US$6,000 in sales the first year. Wyman, 32, joined TikTok at the start of the pandemic, launched new products and posted a couple of videos that went viral. In 2022, she grossed US$217,000.
“A part of what people have done on this app is created their own slice of the American dream that is preached so much about,” said Wyman, who is based in Arizona, “whether it’s opening a small business or people who are no longer facing homelessness, people who are able to retire, creators who are now allowed to pursue their creative pursuits.”
The Biden administration has recently increased efforts to force a sale of TikTok by its owner ByteDance, which is a Chinese technology company subject to Chinese law – the same thing Donald Trump sought to do in 2020 with a ban that was blocked by federal courts.
On March 15, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States reportedly gave ByteDance an ultimatum: sell TikTok or face a ban in the US.
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A recent bill introduced in the Senate that would enable the Biden administration to ban TikTok has bipartisan support.
An outright ban of the app would be a devastating blow to many of the small businesses that have turned to TikTok to reach potential customers instead of shelling out for more traditional and pricey forms of marketing.
Kellis Landrum, co-founder of Los Angeles marketing agency True North Social, said Facebook and Instagram are “pay-to-play” platforms that do not give as much of a return on investment.
“TikTok offers the broadest organic reach of any of the channels right now,” Landrum said. “If you’re very successful on TikTok, that’s probably most of what you’re focusing on because [as] a small business, you can’t afford to attack marketing on a bunch of different fronts at the same time.”
Elyse Burns, who runs a stationery and home goods design company she launched in college in 2015, said she has seen a direct correlation between her TikTok videos and sales. After posting a video featuring a shipment of day planners that got 2.9 million views in June 2022, she sold more than 2,000 day planners in two days.
“I can look at my sales and see like that month, I had a viral TikTok,” Burns said.
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Last year, she did US$1 million in sales through her website, which receives traffic from TikTok and Instagram. She devotes four hours a day to those two platforms but has since expanded to doing wholesale and opening a storefront in Durham, North Carolina, to diversify her revenue. Through her business, which she now runs full time, she’s been able to pay off most of her student loans and purchase a house.
Christina Ha experienced a similar phenomenon with her New York cat cafe and rescue organisation, Meow Parlour. In late 2020, she started posting videos of her retired parents interacting with some of her foster kittens.
When she posted a video about her parents sewing cat beds to support her rescue work, her audience clamoured to buy them. She raised US$20,000 in one week.
“It was insane and kind of unexpected,” Ha said. “When I look back at the video, it probably wasn’t my finest work.”
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A video she posted this month, with the caption “A day in the life of my 76-year-old dad”, got 10.2 million views – and another US$30,000 in cat bed sales. She has also received a flurry of visitors to Meow Parlour who have signed up to foster and adopt cats and become monthly donors to the non-profit.
“TikTok is so, so, so amazing. The community is extremely supportive in a way I’ve not found on other social media platforms,” Ha said.
Even businesses such as garbage can cleaning and carpet repair have found audiences on TikTok.
Josh Nolan, who runs Carpet Repair Guys in the San Francisco Bay Area, said he joined TikTok after nearly two decades of doing carpet repair after a technician told him he needed to get on social media. The results were astounding.
When he started moving content that he posted on Instagram and Facebook to TikTok, they were “just going through the roof in the numbers”, Nolan said.
Nolan still uses Yelp and Google AdWords to bring in business, but he hears from customers all the time that they have watched TikTok or YouTube videos of him doing carpet repairs, he said. He now has more than 850,000 followers on the app and makes some additional income through brand sponsorships.
Last fall, TikTok partnered with American Express on its #ShopSmall Accelerator programme to help small businesses during the holiday shopping season. A week after the Senate bill to give the federal government the power to ban the app was introduced, TikTok launched an initiative highlighting small-business entrepreneurs who have found explosive success on the platform, allowing many to quit their day jobs.
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That is what Wyman hopes to do, but the uncertainty of TikTok now gives her pause.
“Wanting to take the leap but also being scared, that you go from … having over 125,000 followers (TikTok and Instagram combined) down to having only 17,000 (on Instagram), that’s a large risk to take,” she said.
As part of the company’s campaign to change lawmakers’ minds, TikTok paid for a group of TikTokers to travel to Washington ahead of Chew’s testimony to protest the potential ban of their beloved app. Chew himself posted a TikTok appealing to the masses a few days before his testimony.
Without access to TikTok, small-business owners say they would probably focus their efforts on Instagram, where they already cross-post content from TikTok. But many are lukewarm about the Meta-owned platform.
“Instagram hasn’t really done much for me as a creator or a small business,” Wyman said. “I’ve used their tools, I’ve tried their ads. … The platforms are nowhere near the same in terms of their audience, their engagement.”
