For Monica Scott and Robin Mair, the past month has brought a lot of emotion every time they logged onto social media.
Between the government's “sell or ban” ultimatum that shut down TikTok in the U.S. for hours on Saturday and users fleeing Facebook and Instagram over Meta's failure to fact-check, entrepreneurs in Ucluelet, British Columbia, say they've had a tough time run a business whose sales are overwhelmingly large. came from social networks.
“Relying on social media that is run by private billionaires can be a little dangerous,” said Mair, co-founder of Mint Cleaning. The cleaning products company attributes 90 percent of its sales to Instagram, but also has a presence on TikTok, YouTube and Facebook.
“In a sense we are at their mercy because we rely on [these platforms]and it’s an uphill battle for us.”
While Meta's changes have so far been limited to the United States, with US President Donald Trump granting TikTok a 75-day reprieve on Monday, Canadian companies like Scott and Mair aren't ready to breathe a sigh of relief just yet.
They view TikTok's looming deadline as the latest in a string of social media changes that have taught them to be flexible and never rely too heavily on one platform.
“The biggest takeaway is that nothing is guaranteed,” Scott said. “It really made us realize the need to diversify our marketing more than we currently do.”
In addition to reminding customers about its activity on multiple platforms, Mint Cleaning is now also engaging the public with its newsletter.
This lesson is also taught by Aruna Revolution, a Dartmouth, North Carolina-based technology company that makes compostable menstrual products.
Observing the recent “chaos” on social media, CEO and founder Rashmi Prakash advised clients to sign up for her company's email newsletter, which cannot be threatened by the whims of any social media company.
She is also exploring whether it makes sense to continue investing resources in the platforms that Aruna Revolution uses: LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
Prakash is particularly concerned that recent policy changes by Facebook and Instagram will lead to an increase in “greenwashing” – false claims about a product's environmental benefits.
“Because of the lack of fact-checking, there will now be more and more people making false claims or exploiting consumers' lack of knowledge to make them think something is a more sustainable or healthier product,” she said.
Switching to other platforms entirely is not a quick fix for these risks, as many of them are as fraught as Instagram and Facebook.
Waves of users have left X, formerly known as Twitter, since it was bought in 2022 by eccentric billionaire Elon Musk, who relaxed content moderation policies that critics said contributed to the spread of misinformation.
Some have tried Threads, Bluesky and Xiaohongshu (aka RedNote), but none of them have enlivened the zeitgeist the way TikTok or the meta platforms of Facebook and Instagram have.
Aruna Revolution has subscribed to Bluesky and RedNote but doesn't actually use them.
“Of course, it takes a lot of effort and time for us to move to a new platform, understand how to use it, understand what content works and what doesn’t work, and at the same time look at the social media platforms that we use. you are already working and seeing so many changes,” Prakash explained.
And new changes may occur.
Even if TikTok overcomes the U.S. government's demand that Chinese parent company ByteDance sell the platform to American buyers or face a ban, the platform would also be under threat in Canada.
Ottawa ordered the dissolution of TikTok's Canadian business (but not a ban on the app) in November following a national security review of ByteDance. TikTok is challenging the order.
“My inbox is full of people. It's full of media and advertisers asking me what to do,” said Sarah Kunar, president of Toronto-based talent agency Platform Media & Management Inc.
She advised Canadian advertisers looking to reach Canadians on TikTok to “continue business as usual,” but suggested advertisers with U.S. ambitions might move to YouTube or Instagram in the short term.
While Platform Media influencers consider which apps to invest time in, Kunar's agents ensure that contracts with advertisers compensate clients for the content they create but cannot publish if the platform crashes or their account is suspended.
Clients are also reminded that a multi-platform approach can soften the blow if something dramatic happens to one site.
“Usually, if we sign a creator who's only on one platform, like they're only on TikTok or they're only on Instagram, we're always very, very vocal. [in telling them] diversify because we've seen a lot of things happen over the last decade,” Kunar said.
“We've been down this road before.”
She often reminds people of the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies such as Lululemon Athletica Inc., Arc'teryx, Coca-Cola and Unilever boycotted Facebook as part of the global StopHateForProfit boycott.
Participants withdrew advertising dollars because they believed the Meta-owned platform had not done enough to keep racist, false, dangerous or white supremacist content off its platform.
“There were months when Instagram ads weren’t selling,” Kunar recalls.
Around the same time, Tina Nguyen founded XXL Scrunchie & Co., a company in Belleville, Ontario that primarily sold scrunchies online.
She now has over 154,000 followers on Instagram and 567,900 on TikTok.
After TikTok warned that it would go offline for its 170 million U.S. users over the weekend, Nguyen “felt lost” and ultimately said goodbye to subscribers who were unable to access the app.
“If there's one thing I've learned on this journey, it's that small business owners and creators are very resilient,” she wrote on the platform. “Change is not easy, but we have faced challenges before and we are ready to face these challenges as well.”
TikTok's restoration was a relief for Nguyen, but knowing how fleeting the reprieve could be and how quickly things could change, she resorted to “going with the flow.”
“I’ll just keep posting and hope for the best,” she said.
