Ways To Foolproof Your Business From Major Revenue Loss Without Socials

It’s no secret there’s currently a TikTok Ban underway (as of Mar 2024), so what does that mean for your business?

If you’re a Digital Creator or Business Owner who depends on TikTok, or any other social media platform for the vast majority of your revenue and traffic… where do you go from here!?

Let me give you 5 shifts you can make ASAP to start seeing revenue from other marketing channels.

Hopefully, knowing your business doesn’t depend on just one platform will help you sleep better at night.

1. CREATE A SOCIAL ARCHIVE, LIKE NOW.

One of the largest mistakes I see creators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses making on social media is relying on the platform as their storage cloud.

This means the only place you can pull old content is from the app’s archives itself.

This is a huge mistake, and all it takes is an account to be hacked or shut down to lose everything you’ve posted on that platform.

So what can you do? You can create a social media archive.

Do this in a file storage space like Dropbox. Here’s the exact process I use:

• Create social media content for the week.

• Download raw or edited versions of videos and photos without on-screen text, music, or in-app logos. This is super important for repurposing in the future.

• Create a weekly recurring task in your Google Calendar (or whatever planning system you use) to upload all video and photo assets for that week to your storage space.

Now, I know that if my Instagram goes down, I have an archive of all my content that can be easily repurposed onto other platforms or marketing channels.

Plus the content is raw or edited WITHOUT on-screen text, audio, or social media logos.

Meaning I can now change the content to fit whatever topics I’m talking about and nothing will hinder performance on other channels.

You do not want to post downloaded TikToks with the logo onto Instagram. Or vice versa.

This will tell the algorithms your content is not original and could lead to community violations.

Social archives are such a great peace of mind. If your account gets hacked, or blocked or a platform is taken down – you still have a vault of content to quickly get working on other channels.

That being said you should also be doing the next recommendation to help with security. And that is…

2. DIVERSIFY YOUR CONTENT OUTPUT.

There is truth to the theory of focusing on one social media platform to grow, but it’s important that like anything in life, you don’t put all your eggs in just one basket.

Meaning, while one social media channel can gladly take the focus of your efforts in order to grow faster, it’s still incredibly important to:

• Capture your preferred usernames on all marketing channels available.

• Create cross-connection for social platforms.

Integrating your social media channels to share posts and engagement can diversify your content and reach more people.

However, it’s important to note that each platform has different requirements for gaining visibility.

I love to use Metricool for this reason to schedule all my content. I can edit posts per channel to make sure they strategically meet the needs of each platform.

3. GET SERIOUS ABOUT SEO & ORGANIC TRAFFIC.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the most under-utilized online tool for business owners, both online and brick-and-mortar.

I’m not an SEO specialist, and won’t pretend to be one, but it’s entirely vital that if you’re making the efforts to run a website, publish content on social media, or blog – your SEO strategy has to be on-point.

One of the best ways to foolproof your business against social media shutdowns is to start adding SEO to your weekly content creation workflows.

This includes using keywords, alt-text, checking links, using titles & headlines that are SEO heavy, etc.

Here’s a great blog from the SEO tool I use, Semrush, on getting started with SEO efforts.

Along with using SEO, you should work on creating multiple sources for organic traffic to your website or offers. If your only source for organic traffic is social media, you’re at risk.

One of the best platforms for organic traffic is Pinterest. If you’re not using Pinterest, now is the time to get serious about it.

If you’ve just been dabbling on Pinterest like high-school fashion trends, it’s time to start scheduling pins that are keyword-heavy and rank well for your niche/business.

The average lifespan for Pins on Pinterest is 4-6 months, sometimes more.

For reference, the average lifespan for Instagram is around 24-40 hours.

So yeah, you need to be on Pinterest.

If you can start using basic SEO principles, or better yet hire a professional to set up all your SEO/Analytics if possible, you’ll be in a great spot should anything happen to your social channels.

4. LEAN INTO E-MAIL MARKETING

E-mail marketing is the key to getting customers off social media but maintaining a daily connection point.

The average working American checks their email inbox 30-60 times a day M- F. That’s a whole lot of opportunity to connect.

If you want to nurture, offer, and provide value to an audience; you need e-mail marketing. Even if it’s just a weekly newsletter.

If your Instagram goes down, imagine being able to communicate what’s happening, still foster community, and make sales through e-mail sequences. It’s a need.

I know there’s a lot of suggestions in this blog, but e-mail marketing takes arguably the least amount of time to set-up and maintain, with extraordinary results.

To foolproof your business from a social media shutdown, you should be actively growing an e-mail subscriber list with plans to nurture your audience, display your personality, and provide value to them via their inbox.

You can work newsletter or e-mail list promotion into your weekly social content via feed or stories to start migrating your audience and don’t be shy to talk about the importance of needing them to subscribe so that if social media shuts down randomly, they don’t miss a beat.

5. BUILD TRUST FUNNELS

You’re likely familiar with marketing funnels, but they’re essentially the journey your customer takes from knowing who you are to purchasing your product.

The funnel at the top is visibility, then consideration, decision, and purchase.

Every person who has ever come into contact with your business is somewhere in your funnel.

Either they’re aware of your business but not involved, or they’re involved with your business in some way (for example: customers, advocates, referrals, etc).

If social media shuts down, do you have another place set up for people to:

1. See You
2. Trust You
3. Learn About You
4. Buy From You
5. Point Others To You

These are the stages of a good funnel. E-mail marketing is a great choice for building funnels, along with landing pages.

Let me give you an example of a funnel in action:

Instagram reel > bio links page > landing page > sign up for newsletter > gets email > buys product

But what if there’s no social media? It would be more like…

SEO brings traffic to website > landing page > sign up for newsletter > gets email > buys product

OR

Listen to podcast with call-to-action > landing page > sign up for newsletter > gets email > buys product

I hope you’re tracking with me here.

The point is you need to map out your customer journey and make sure there are touch-points to your business in multiple places other than just social media.

BONUS: MIGRATE YOUR AUDIENCE.

If the TikTok ban goes through (in March 2024), you’ll have five months until September 2024 to migrate your audience to another social media platform.

Whether that be Instagram, YouTube, a podcast, etc. It’s really up to you, and that decision should be based on where your followers will be going.

Here are some great tips for migrating your audience:

• Don’t just say outright you want them to leave one app for another. This could cause community violations. Instead, start heavily suggesting that people ALSO get involved with you on other platforms, with the next steps on how to do so.

• Focus on the WHY. Make sure people thoroughly hear from you why it’s important for your content to be diversified, saying things like, “I want to make sure you can find my content easily!”

• Add migration into your everyday or weekly routine on social media. Instead of waiting to migrate people, start trickling it into your content. Great marketing plans are likely doing this anyway. You should be sharing links to join your newsletter, and constantly giving people ways to take the next steps with your business. This will make migration seamless.

THE WRAP UP

Truthfully, each of these marketing channels could use an individual series of blog posts, which I’ll be working on.

Hopefully, though you have a good idea of the options you have and actions to take to start fool-proofing your business from a TikTok ban or any other social media shutdown.

Until next time,

Jayda Martin