By Megan Graham and Katie Deighton
TikTok will go dark in the U.S. on Sunday, barring a last-minute reprieve from a federal law requiring its Chinese owners to sell it or shut it down.
That means brands could lose followings that were years in the making literally overnight.
If that happens, "I think we certainly try and build communities elsewhere, but there's no substitute," said Mike Zeman, chief marketing officer at family safety and location app Life360. "TikTok is more than 10 times the size of our other communities, and so there's no easy fix to redirect that community, and that community looks different from an audience composition standpoint than what we've built up and accrued on Instagram and other places."
Life360 has built a TikTok following of 1.5 million with the frequent posting of memes and goofy comments.
In an America without TikTok, Life360 would redistribute its budget for paid TikTok ads to alternative venues like Pinterest, Alphabet's YouTube and Meta Platforms' Facebook and Instagram, Zeman said. It would also continue to work with content creators on Instagram and YouTube.
"We do have budget earmarked in 2025 for TikTok, which we'd very much like to deploy," Zeman said.
Some newer or smaller companies that have built customer bases largely on TikTok have been preparing for its possible end, although reluctantly.
Food brand Final Boss Sour, whose posts and ads encourage consumers to try its sour candies, made nearly 60% of its fourth-quarter revenue from TikTok Shop sales alone, according to James Hicks, co-founder and general manager. Its videos, as well as those it makes with creators, feature the puckered faces of taste testers and challenge viewers to see if they can handle the tart tastes.
Final Boss Sour has developed audiences on Instagram and YouTube, and is confident it can sell through any channel with a social video component, Hicks said. But TikTok has historically delivered the best return on the company's investment and the best reach, he said.
"I'm nervous for sure," Hicks said, adding that a ban would put greater impetus on its plans to sell on TikTok Shop in the U.K.
Candle company NaturalAnnie Essentials says a viral TikTok post helped put it on the map with consumers. It has been pushing its followers to visit its website and join its email list, founder and Chief Executive Annya Brown said.
Dasha Derkach has used Amazon, Instagram and YouTube to diversify sales channels for her Enchanted Scrunch brand of scrunchies. She gets 15% to 20% of her sales from TikTok now, down from 90% last year.
But TikTok remains valuable to Derkach's business. If the ban takes effect, "I am kind of hoping that, all together, the community on TikTok decides on a new platform to kind of switch over to," she said.
Zip, a buy-now, pay-later provider, stopped spending on TikTok earlier this week in anticipation of the ban, according to Jinal Shah, Zip's chief marketing officer and general manager. The rumblings of its prohibition throughout the last few years pushed the company to diversify its efforts across social media early on, she said.
Now Zip's creative team is getting ready to adapt the creator-led stories and messages that resonated well on TikTok for Instagram and YouTube, where the company has historically employed a different style of marketing, Shah said.
The TikTok ordeal has yielded viral attention for language-learning app Duolingo, which has playfully joked on social media about users fleeing to a Chinese app called RedNote, where most of the content is in Chinese language.
"Ooh so NOW you're learning mandarin," the brand posted on X this week.
Duolingo was already trying to reduce its reliance on TikTok, but will boost its attention to a vertical-video alternative if necessary.
"We will not change our approach" when it comes to tone, said Emmanuel Orssaud, the company's chief marketing officer. "I think we will move to replace TikTok with another short-form social platform, like Instagram Reels, like YouTube Shorts." The company has already diversified efforts to those other channels, seeing strong growth on platforms such as Shorts as a result, he said.
Creators who promote brands on TikTok will also need to figure out their next steps should the app go dark. Molly Rutter, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based content creator, left her teaching job to go full time on TikTok last summer.
Rutter says she plans to focus on YouTube if she can't use TikTok. She doesn't yet have enough subscribers to earn ad revenue through YouTube's official partner program, but sees it as her best option.
"I'm devastated," Rutter said, of the potential loss of TikTok. "It's really a special platform."
Write to Megan Graham at megan.graham@wsj.com and Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 17, 2025 15:33 ET (20:33 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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