Will TikTok Be Banned and Why Should the PR World Care?

What a Ban Would Mean For Public Relations
By Rudy Rizo

In the last few months, the Trump administration has had an increasingly aggressive stance towards the popular video app TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance. Citing Chinese access to American user data, President Trump is now attempting to force a sale of the app to a U.S. company, to which Beijing would rather see American operations shuttered rather than sold off, according to a report from Reuters. With the app’s future being uncertain, I would like to address three simple questions: What is TikTok? Why should we as PR professionals care? And what happens if TikTok is shut down?

TikTok is a video app where users can create and edit videos up to a minute long using a variety of tools such as filters, overlays and background music, to name a few. It is somewhat of a mix between the short video style of Snapchat combined with the newsfeed and interaction qualities of Instagram. There are currently an estimated 800 million active monthly users worldwide, with 25% of users between ages 18 to 24.

As a public relations tool, TikTok is effective in giving quick and concise information to a primarily young adult audience. Thanks to its ease of use on mobile devices, brands can use these short videos as a form of public service announcements for new services and products that can easily be incorporated into any communications plan. Brands with teens and young adults as their primary audience would find the most success using TikTok.

However, with a potential ban, public relations agencies may lose access to this valuable tool. In the event a brand’s primary social channel becomes unavailable, the next best thing would be to look at their audience’s preferences and see what other means by which they get their information. While TikTok has a predominantly young adult audience, that audience has some heavy overlap with other apps like Snapchat and Instagram.

​Future communications plans should have backup scenarios in the event one of their primary channels becomes unavailable due to a situation such as this. Research the preferred apps and channels of the brand’s audience and create different versions of the same campaign message optimized for those apps.

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