A potential TikTok ban could help creator marketing explode. Most new social platforms aren’t ready.

What doesn’t worry me about a TikTok ban:

• Nothing will happen for quite a while. Not only did the verbiage in the House bill extend the sale “cliff” to up to a year (nine months for a sale, with an option to extend another three months if a sale is in progress), but ByteDance will almost certainly challenge the law should it pass. It remains to be seen whether the courts would allow the nine-month sales cliff clock to run during a challenge.

• I’m far from the only person to suggest that Meta (specifically, Instagram) and YouTube Shorts stand to gain the most in the immediate term following a TikTok ban. That hasn’t changed.

What does worry me about a TikTok ban:

What happens to social media in the US after that immediate term?

The last several years kicked off an era of social media innovation rivaling the late 2000’s/early 2010’s, making it challenging to predict long-term winners beyond high-level statements like “it’ll benefit Meta”.

It’s not that simple. I’ve gone on the record (and have written) about the coming atomization of media and social media. To summarize: if you believe self-reported metrics, social media startups from BeReal to Spill to Rumble to Threads to Planta to Kitchenbowl to PupPic others are surviving and growing. Not all survive, but I believe many will find enough of a business to last.

There are many reasons that it’s hard to predict right now who will survive and thrive. Few, if any, of the social media startups nail my 5 Fundamentals for Success for Social Media Companies checklist. For the record, that’s understandable. Most of the companies are young, and have had to prioritize basic functionality to get off the ground.

However, one failure in particular worries me the most: the complete failure of most of the platforms to foster a creator-friendly environment – spanning creator discovery, the ability for creators to grow their followings (and to benefit financially), and the ease with which more creators to do the same.

As of now, almost none of the new platforms are doing well for creators. Not only is it quite hard for users to discover creators on most of the next-generation platforms, but for most creators, creating content for those platforms is a non-starter, since the platforms lack even the most basic of tools and functionality for creators to develop a presence they can grow and monetize.

I imagine part of the issue starts at the audience level: most of these platforms don’t yet command an audience where brands are deciding to make “serious” investments in audience growth on the platform. Absent brand investment, there simply aren’t many incentivization opportunities for creators on these platforms, which in turn, probably knocks creator features down the platform product priority list.

Add this all up, and this moment creates a kind of to-do list for platforms that want to capture the (potential) audiences looking for new homes following a (potential) TikTok ban:

1.    Start brainstorming now (if you have not already) about the creator experience on your platform. Identify the product and personnel gaps required to make that happen. Prioritize them from most urgent to least.

2.    Following a year-plus of operation for many of these platforms, they should have good ideas of audience segments of strength. Identify those, quickly. (identifying growth-area audience segments would also be nice.)

3.    Start having conversations with members of that community. What creators do they follow, on and off the platform? What creators do they follow that they wish were on the platform?

4.    Talk to those creators, even pre-product. Vet your product gaps identified in step 1 by the creators; do they agree? What’s missing? What would it take for them to create more for your platform? Who else should join and create for the platform that does not already?

5.    With your internal product prioritization in hand and input from your audience and creator communities, start to build. Provide updates on progress. Form test communities, especially among creators.

6.    As the product nears readiness, form a target list of brands that would make sense for this cohort. Brief them on your plans. Invite them to experiment. Be clear about the value of the target audience they could reach on your platform, and what kind of investment they should make to test. Keep the brands posted on your progress.

7.    Launch. Test. Pay CLOSE attention to the creator content, brand campaigns, and your target audience communities.

8.    Learn. Tweak. Expand to a second target audience cohort. Repeat.

I think that the platforms that move quickest and best on creator marketing will gain a massive advantage in capturing the potential audiences lost from a TikTok ban – and experience user growth regardless of such a ban ever taking place.