TikTok is (probably) shutting down.
The app I used to grow an audience of over 2 MILLION followers is likely disappearing this week –– but I’m not afraid, and you shouldn’t be either.
In this bonus episode, I’m breaking down how my team is preserving my data on TikTok and planning for a future without the app that brought us SO much. I’m also getting into how I got followers off of social media and onto my own land and how you can do the same as a business owner.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Tori Dunlap: If you are a business owner who uses social media to find customers to build your audience, we need to talk because it seems like the TikTok ban is happening.
Regardless of whether you’re on TikTok or not, and regardless of whether you’re a business owner or not, we’re going to have a conversation today about the steps you can take to prepare for this or any upcoming changes to social media, how you can build a business where you’re not 100 percent reliant on platforms you don’t own, and what this means for, I mean,the rest of our consumption in general. Let’s talk about it. If you’re new to the show, hi, I’m Tori. I am a multimillionaire. I am a New York Times bestselling author. This podcast is the number one money podcast for women in the world, but we also talk about how money affects women differently and the challenges of building and growing a business.
And that’s why we got to talk about everything going on right now with TikTok and Meta and social media in general. Timestamp. I am recording this at 10 20 a. m. on Thursday, January 16th, 10 20 pacific time. There’s been a lot of conversation about what this ban means for businesses in general, and that’s where we’re going to start.
We’re going to start with what this TikTok ban might mean, what could happen, what’s almost guaranteed to happen, and then What we can learn from it in general, what this means for other social media platforms, both for us as users, but also for anybody creating content on these platforms. And more broadly, we’re going to spend a good chunk of our time today discussing how can you create a sustainable business where if the ban happens, if the algorithm changes, if your account gets taken down, your business is not completely and totally devastated.
To give you some context, go all the way back to 2020, 2021, we blew up on TikTok. July of 2020, I posted our fifth ever video on TikTok and it went crazy viral. Like we’re talking millions of views in a couple of days, And I believe I gained around 200, 000 followers in less than two weeks.
When I say that TikTok changed my business, but really changed my life is not an over exaggeration. TikTok was the reason I got a book deal.
TikTok was the reason this podcast debuted as the number one business podcast in the world, less than 72 hours after it was released. TikTok allowed me to hire people and to help women all over the world feel better about their money. But it was more than just. The impact it made for my own finances and for my own business.
It was the way that we could get this information to people who needed it most. We have seen people use our TikTok content to escape abusive marriages. We have seen women be able to negotiate 20, 50%, 75 percent raises and salary increases. We’ve seen women be able to leave. their toxic jobs or their unsafe apartments.
We’ve seen them pay off their student loans and their credit card debt and be able to save even their first thousand dollars. And so when we talk about this TikTok ban, if you’re not someone who uses the app regularly, or is maybe someone who believes like, I think a lot of people in Congress do, that TikTok is just a bunch of 19 year olds doing dance videos and sharing cat videos.
That’s not all of it. In fact, that’s not even close to the majority. TikTok has been a place where education has become democratized, where political movements and social movements have been given the opportunity to have more airtime. The fact that you and I even know about Project 2025, that’s because of TikTok.
That was because of TikTok users discussing its potential impact on Americans. This whole idea of TikTok going away. In the name of national security, to me, it’s just absolute bullsh*t Because we also know that there are dozens of other social media and online platforms that are American companies that have just as much data, if not more.
Google, Meta, these platforms run. and exist because of the amount of information they have on people. And with Meta’s recent, uh, rolling back of fact checking, with Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments that, uh, social media needs to have more masculine energy, this is not a Chinese government TikTok foreign app problem.
This is a general data social media problem. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but God, it feels like censorship, doesn’t it? Like it feels like this app is being removed in the name of something that most Americans actually don’t feel like is that much of a threat and that [00:05:00] Congress is spending their time…
Rather than increasing the federal minimum wage, or helping reduce climate change, or preventing gun violence, they’re spending their time trying to get this app banned. I think the studies have said recently, 80 something percent of Americans don’t actually want banned. This would have a direct impact on my business, on my ability to do the incredible work that we do to change women’s lives every single day.
And it also has a direct impact on literally thousands and thousands of other small businesses. Let’s talk about what they’re actually doing. Discussing in terms of a ban on TikTok. As of January 16th at 1030 a. m. Pacific time, there has been a rumor going around that TikTok would basically continue to exist on American phones, right?
This was, this was what we expected that it just wouldn’t be available in the app store anymore. And that it would slowly kind of disintegrate because there was no updates. There were, you couldn’t update it. You couldn’t get like bugs removed, et cetera.
So now we’re hearing rumors that TikTok is not going to let the app slowly disintegrate, but instead is looking to have the app go completely dark in the United States by January 19th.
That’s Sunday, January 19th. So rather than us being able to potentially continue using the app, even as it slowly malfunctions, it is a hard stop, not available, completely goes dark on Sunday. An act to extend the deadline. The TikTok ban deadline to 90 days from now did not pass the Senate.
However, both Biden and Trump administrations are right now considering executive actions and reviewing options to potentially not completely remove the ban, but instead delay it, right? Give us more time. The Supreme Court has also not released an opinion yet. on what they want to do if the deletion, the ban of TikTok is violating free speech.
I recommend checking out Under the Desk News, V is Fantastic, or The News Girl for updates. They’ve both covered this extensively and are covering it in real time and that’s where I’m getting a lot of my news right now. So what this means is we’re in a holding pattern. We’re still waiting to see if it’s actually going to go dark.
We’re not sure. And even as you’re listening to this episode, there has probably been changes since I recorded this. So At this time, we don’t really know what’s going to happen. We have no idea if someone’s going to swoop in in the last minute, even if TikTok maybe is going to get a last minute buyer.
Those have been rumors floating around, but it looks like a ban could go through regardless. So I have to tell you that I’ve seen this coming. We have been having conversations about a TikTok ban for years now. I have been interviewed on Forbes and CNN and NBC News for years now about a potential TikTok ban.
And I also have been listening. And following along with other business owners way before I even knew that TikTok existed about the importance of diversifying your audience, diversifying where your audience is able to connect with you, because here’s the deal. And this is the reality for thousands and thousands of businesses.
If you grow your following, your audience, your customers on a platform, you don’t own TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, BlueSky, Pinterest, Twitter, Twitter, great example, any of these platforms that you do not own. You are completely subject to the whims of that platform. It gets sold to Elon Musk and tanks in quality, not in your control.
Your account gets suspended or banned for something that the platform deems that you did that was inappropriate. I mean, this has happened to us. We had our Instagram account taken away for an entire morning. And the only reason we were able to get it back is because, you know, We had some contacts there, something as dramatic as the entire platform going away or not being available in your country where the vast majority of your customers live, or even just algorithmic changes.
The algorithm changes and the incredible content that was seeing hundreds of thousands, millions of views, a ton of conversions to your website or to your products changes, vanishes. That hits your bottom line. That hits your ability to be able to market your business, to be able to hire people, and to be able to get your message out in the world.
And even if you’re not a business owner and you are posting your life, any part of, you know, your experience on social media, you are also susceptible to any and all changes on that platform. And for me, I’m just gonna be honest with you. I don’t love Mark Zuckerberg. [00:10:00] I don’t know if anybody does. I don’t. Definitely don’t love Elon Musk. Like these platforms though are absolutely necessary to my business.
And I wish that I could quit meta. I wish I could say, you know what, Instagram, I’m not going to do it anymore. But that would be on the same week as TikTok going away. I’m about to lose 2. 4 million followers on TikTok. I’m also about to lose five years of almost daily content that I have produced and my team has produced.
That’s crazy. That’s insane. So let’s first talk about what we need to do, the step by step checklist. If you have any sort of videos on TikTok that you’re looking to save, and then we’re also at the end of this episode, going to spend some time on what does this experience teach us, right? About building on borrowed land.
So if you have any sort of content on TikTok, download your data. What you’re going to do is you’re going to go into your TikTok settings and you’re going to download your data, not just your posts. You also want to download your metrics, right? If you have any sponsored content that you’ve done in the past that you want to be able to show as a case study to get future brand deals or future collaborations or partnerships, You need to make sure you have the data to do that.
You want to screenshot your follower counts. How many likes all of your videos have gotten, right? Even just the homepage of your TikTok. You built that, you did it. Regardless of whether it exists anymore, you should still be able to tout it. The other thing we want to do on TikTok is make sure that any connections we’ve made, we are following up with them and giving them another place to connect with us.
I have made incredible connections on TikTok. Other people with tens of millions of followers, celebrities, politicians. So I am going in to my TikTok DMs and just saying, Hey, if this actually does go away, here’s my email. Here’s my Instagram. Here’s where we can connect. And then I’m going and making sure I’m also connecting with them on the other platforms.
We’ve also sent, you know, DMs back and forth where they have given me their email or their phone number, and maybe I didn’t save it. We are screenshotting those and then documenting them in our CRM to make sure that we have them.
One of the things my team is already encountering is that I think everyone’s trying to pull their data right now. And so I’m going to be honest with you, we’re figuring out the best way because we might not have it right now. We have, if it really does go dark on Sunday, we have a very short time window here.
So if you have not a ton of posts, it might be worth this to do it manually. The last thing I’m doing, and if you follow me on TikTok, you’ve seen this is I am doing. A absolute throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and just posting every draft I have. I I am posting all of the drafts so that I get non watermarked versions of them that I can then post elsewhere.
We don’t want all of your hard work to go to waste. We want you to be able to have reshare on Instagram, on YouTube Shorts, somewhere else. And let’s say the TikTok ban doesn’t happen. Well, cool. This was probably a good. Piece of homework anyway, is getting all of your valuable content off of the platform and saved, documented so that you have it for the future. And again, we don’t entirely know what is happening as you’re listening to this. So follow some other creators that are talking about it. Go to your new source that’s trusted and they’re going to help you figure out how to navigate this too.
So what does this teach us? What does a TikTok ban, or Zuckerberg saying weird shit, or Elon Musk buying Twitter, what does this teach us? I alluded to this before, but I’m going to echo it again. When you build a business, Especially an entire business focused on land that you don’t own.
Where you are completely susceptible to the whims of the algorithm or to a CEO’s rants or to what is happening with the general public sentiment of that platform or app, your business has the opportunity to suffer, and this is why it’s so important that.
When you’re using social media, I’m not telling you not to use it. I have 5 million followers on social media. I have the business I do because of social media. This is not me telling you never to use it. Unfortunately, we live under capitalism. These are some of the best tools for democratization in terms of our, like, being able to grow a business, being able to be an artist that makes money.
Like, these platforms are so powerful, but they need to be the top of your funnel when you’re thinking about building a sustainable, marketable business. When I say top of funnel, what I mean is that I use social media and our team uses social media as a way for folks who maybe have never heard of us or don’t know they need financial education in their lives to discover us.
We use Instagram, TikTok, these social platforms and their algorithm to be able to showcase our content, [00:15:00] showcase our value to people who need it most. The moment that that person is engaged in our community, they’ve hit follow, they have liked a post, right? They’re now part of the Instagram universe, part of our TikTok universe.
My number one goal is to actually get them off the platform. My number one goal is to use these platforms for exposure to potential customers, to potential community members, and then get them onto land I own. Now, what is land I own? I’ll give you the best example of this. It’s an email list. I own the emails.
Of folks who have decided to opt into our resources. Now they can leave at any time, right? You can unsubscribe from a mailing list at any time. However, I don’t have to deal with the algorithm on email. I don’t have to deal with. A random CEO being weird and shitty. I don’t have to deal with a potential entire platform ban.
Email’s not going away. I also have way more data. I can determine if someone has opened the email, if someone has clicked on the email, how like engaged they are. Have they opened every single email we’ve sent them since they subscribed? Or have they never opened an email? We know a lot more and we can tailor their experience a lot better to make sure that we’re delivering actual value for those customers, for those subscribers.
So in 2021, I had a TikTok go viral. It got seven, six or 7 million views in a couple of weeks. That would have been fantastic. That virality in and of itself would have been fantastic. We gained like another 500,000 followers on TikTok. It was incredible. We got features on Buzzfeed and on the Daily Mail, which woof, but fine.
I believe we got features on CNBC as well. We got a ton of press features out of it, which was fantastic. But if I do say so myself, I did something really, really smart with that video. Most people are pleased with that. I went viral. That was cool. But virality is temporary. Systems are forever. In the caption for that video, which was about the amount of money I was going to have saved at retirement because I was investing.
And then I explained and debunked some investing myths and how people could get started. I said, take the quiz linked in our bio for a free personalized money plan. Because what I had done is spent time with my team building a quiz. Kristen remembers those days. Remember, Kristen? We built the quiz! She’s nodding.
She was like, that was the most stressful three weeks of my life. But! Building that quiz was the best way for us to 1. Deliver really good value to people and 2. In exchange for that value, get their email so that we could control that land, right? It was a land that I slash the company owned. We use TikTok, the social media platform to get the eyeballs and then we converted the eyeballs into email subscribers.
I’m going to tell you what happened. We took that one video. An organic video that I shot in a sweatshirt and no makeup. And in one week, that video led to a hundred thousand email subscribers.
You might have discovered me because of that video. You might’ve taken the quiz that we offer because of that video. And fun fact, when I sometimes plug the quiz on this podcast, herfirst100k. com slash quiz, That’s the same quiz we built four years ago. So I need you to think not just right now as TikTok’s about to go away, but for any social platform you’re on that you’re trying to use to build a business.
How can I use that social platform for eyeballs, for exposure? And then how do I get them off the platform and onto land I own? I think the email list is the best way to go about that. And the best way to get people on your email list is to give something of value to them. Maybe that is discovering their money personality, which is what my quiz helps you do.
We have had over a million people take that quiz. Now, some people have left, some people have unsubscribed. Some people just wanted the quiz and then peaced out fine, but we have over 850, 000 email subscribers still. And many of whom are probably that original 100, 000 from that one crazy viral TikTok.
You can also get folks on your email list by promoting some sort of freebie or digital download. by offering some sort of value on your website or in your link in bio on Instagram, on YouTube, on TikTok, whenever.
Maybe it’s a free five day challenge. Maybe it’s a workshop. Maybe it’s putting your knowledge into a course. There are all kinds of ways that you can provide [00:20:00] value to somebody. In exchange for their email. This is land you own. And this is one of the reasons why, yes, I’m very upset about this TikTok ban.
I’m bummed about it. And I think it’s bullshit, but I’m not scared. I’m bummed and I wish it wasn’t happening, but I’m not freaking out because my business is not a hundred percent reliant on any individual platform because I have taken the steps to make sure that we have an audience that we control.
That sounds a little dictatorship y, you know what I mean? An audience that is not susceptible to the whims of an algorithm. That’s what I mean. One of the other best ways to start building on land you own is to either start or be on other podcasts. This was one of the reasons why Financial Feminist exists, because one, I wanted to have longer conversations and be able to provide more value than just at the time, 60 second videos on TikTok or Instagram.
But because I have a lot more control over how people listen to the show, the format of it, how we produce episodes. And also these platforms are not as algorithmically driven. They’re based on downloads. They’re based on how many people listen to the show. They’re not necessarily based on a algorithm deciding, Oh yeah, the show’s hot right now.
So I’m really going to push it. If you subscribe to this show, you’re going to get messages every single week that this show has a new episode, right? So you can listen. And if you don’t want to start a podcast or that’s just not in your wheelhouse, we’ll go on other people’s podcasts. Use their audience, provide value to their audience, and then maybe at the end, tell them about the free workshop or the free digital download or the quiz they can take so that you can get their email too.
There’s ways to go about building a business where you are not 100 percent entirely building on land that you don’t own. And my absolute plea to business owners listening is that you take this shit seriously. I know it almost sounds like, I don’t know, 2010’s business marketing of like, get an email list, but there’s a reason we’ve been talking about this for like 20 years.
And it’s because it’s so important. It’s because Bans can happen and algorithms can change and CEOs completely fuck over a platform or your account gets taken down or the bullies are so bad that you don’t want to show up on social media anymore. That’s happened to so many of my friends is that social media can be a really beautiful place but also a really toxic place.
And they have to basically almost shut down their entire business because they built it on social media exclusively and their mental health is tanking and they don’t want to show up anymore. And especially with TikTok, because I have so many colleagues and friends who spent 2020, 2021, 2022 blowing up on TikTok and they have millions, if not tens of millions of followers and they’re about to lose it all.
So when it comes to this ban, we’re not sure what’s going to happen yet. It’s not looking good. And I also want you, and I just, please, please, please, please, please, please. I need you to take this shit seriously, to view your social media. If it is a business. As a real business where you’re thinking strategically about how and when you get followers, about where those followers go after they’ve engaged with you on one of these platforms so that you can help buy yourself business insurance.
That’s really what you’re doing, right? When you create an email list, when you give someone a place to go on land that you own. That is business insurance, so that you are not as susceptible to changes to these big, dramatic shutdowns. So yeah, we’re talking about this whole thing of building on land you own as kind of a response to this TikTok ban. But this is good advice on any day of the week. This is good advice no matter what, because these things you have no control over. So this is what we’re talking about with having business insurance is that regardless of whether it is a TikTok ban or not, we’re using that as a, as a excuse to talk about this, but this is important information regardless. This is important information two years ago and two years from now.
And if you’re not a business owner and you’ve listened to this whole thing, first of all, thank you. And second of all, [00:25:00] it’s the same kind of thing. Which is, if you’ve poured all of your life, all of your consumption into one platform and it goes away, I don’t know, maybe your life gets better.
It probably doesn’t. And it’s just a good reminder in general. That whether you have been 100 percent reliant on a platform to build a business or 100 percent reliant on a platform for friendship or connection or your news or your entertainment, is that if that platform goes away, I need you to have alternates.
I need you to have other places where you feel like you have community and other places where you do feel like there are people you can connect to and you get the information you need.
I have some resources down below, one of which is our Instagram growth workshop. Which I would be remiss if I did not shamelessly plug right now. Because I do have a lot of friends who are now gonna have to start over. Or who are now thinking about growing on other platforms in order to sustain their livelihood.
And I’ve been able to grow to over 2 million followers on Instagram. Without buying ads, without buying followers. And so we have my entire marketing strategy in a workshop, and we’ll link that down in the show notes. Regardless of whether you’re a business owner or not, if you enjoy TikTok, it is not too late to make your voice heard.
I need you to call your representative. I need you to call your senators. I need you to tell them that you do not want a TikTok ban. You want them to delay the TikTok ban and also what it would mean if TikTok went away. I did this yesterday. I called and got through to a real person at, I think Maria Cantwell’s office, who was my Senator. And I told her the impact that a TikTok ban would have on me, on my ability to run my business and on the millions of women that we help every single day.
So if you’re feeling helpless, if you’re feeling this lack of control, okay, we know what to do. We know what to do with any sort of pisses us off. We can, of course, vote when it’s time to vote. We can call our representatives. We can sign petitions. We can stay informed and we can also take really fucking good care of ourselves.
So I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t, we don’t know how this is going to all shake out,
but it is a great excuse. To remind yourself, especially if you are a business owner who uses social media to get customers, to grow an audience, to connect with a community, to not be a hundred percent reliant on land that you don’t own, to not build your beautiful, badass, incredible company. On land you don’t own, exclusively on land that you don’t own, and to think strategically about creating communities where you have more control, where you’re not dependent on a white male CEO or an algorithm or the US government.
I am here with you every step of the way, as always, I appreciate you being here and we’ll talk to you very soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Researched by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video Engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram and Meghan Walker. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe. And theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirsthundredk.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
