← The Mindful Marketing Podcast (Formerly Known As The Savvy Social Podcast)
The Mindful Marketing Podcast (Formerly Known As The Savvy Social Podcast)
TikTok Ban Drama and Social Media Updates to Watch Right Now
00:25:57
Overwhelmed by all the social media updates? Don’t worry—I’ve got you covered! In this episode, I’m breaking down the latest social media news and what it means for your business. From the TikTok ban (yes, it may still happen!) to...
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A
Oh boy. I've got lots of social media news and updates today that I'm gonna get into because it feels like every single platform went, 1, 2, 3, let's update things right the hell now. So with that, let's get into episode number 342 of the Mindful Marketing Podcast. If you're new here. Hi. Hello. My name is Andrea Jones and I'm a mindful marketing strategist where I am determined to help you connect more so scroll less so that we can grow together. Before I dive in, let's get into a word from our sponsor.
- [00:33]
B
I've recorded over 300 podcast episodes.
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A
Yeah, it's a lot of podcast episodes.
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B
And I've tried a lot of different virtual recording studios, but my favorite has been Riverside. Riverside makes their virtual recording studio look so profess. My guests love it. Plus I also low key love recording.
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A
YouTube videos in here as well because.
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It'S so easy to use. My team also loves Riverside because it spits out separate audio video tracks, making editing easy. Breezy lemon squeezy. And if you want a little magic, they've got this tool called Magic Clips.
- [01:08]
A
Which uses AI to take your video.
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And turn it into perfect social media sized videos. I'm talking vertical videos for TikTok and Instagram, Facebook reels, all the places you can post these videos with the captions included and you don't have to hunt and search for for that perfect clip. So if you want to try this out for yourself, click the link that goes with this video or if you're listening to the audio on the podcast, it's in the show notes. Okay, Click that Link, use the 15% off coupon code. It's DREA D R E A and try Riverside for yourself. Thank you, Riverside.
- [01:44]
A
All right, today's episode a little bit different because there are lots of updates. Now I want to preface this by saying I don't usually bring social media news and updates to to this right here podcast. Inside of my membership in the Mindful Marketing Lab, I have a social media news and trends channel where I post social media news and trends as they happened, if you will. And then once a month we have a session called what's the Scoop? Where I go over all of the social media news and trends as well as some of the top performing posts that I see out and about here on the interwebs. However, a lot has happened and so I sat down to research it all after coming back of like a sickness last week that I just kind of like went offline a little Bit for. And I was like, holy moly. There's a lot going on, so let me record a video for my members. And then as I was recording a video for my members, I was like, yeah, this needs to go out to the public at large. So here you are. You're welcome. If you're a member, you got this a week early. If not, you're listening to it on the podcast for context. I recorded this January 21, 2025. So if anything's outdated, that's why. Now, first, big news, and I'm going to try to go in order of events here, because these news stories kind of go together, like they kind of go hand in hand. And the first one is the TikTok ban. Okay, this TikTok ban is not new, y'all. I have been talking about the TikTok ban for five years. I went back and looked, and in my notes, I have here the TikTok band. The TikTok was going to be banned first. The hint. The first hint of the ban was July 2020. July 2020 is when President Trump was saying that they were considering a ban of TikTok. This was kind of because of, you know, Covid Corona, the pandemic. Right? It was because of that. You know, it started in China and there was a lot of contentious comments about that. And so as he does, he kind of just said it and spoke it into existence, and we were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. But over the years, there have been multiple instances where TikTok is going to be banned. In fact, by August 2020, President Trump had issued an executive order saying TikTok had to be banned due to the way that it collected our data. By September, it had blocked the downloading of the app for certain government officials, things like that. Know, here in Canada, for instance, it is blocked as well. Again, how TikTok itself gathers data and what that other countries do with that data. This has been appealed and rebanned and represented over the years. By July 2021, Joe Biden, President Joe Biden had existed, issued an executive order revoking the ban. But then by December 2022, the Senate had proposed a new ban. Fast forward to today. So by January 19, it was official. TikTok is not supposed to be owned by China. Okay. And this is where the ban. The. The order is coming into place. It's not necessarily saying that TikTok can't exist. It's saying that TikTok should not be primarily owned by a Chinese company. So technically, if someone else were to purchase 51% of the company. It wouldn't be mostly owned by a Chinese company and all would be well. That has not happened. And so technically, TikTok is banned in the US officially, I didn't think we'd get here, but here we are. The big drama being that on the 19th or leading up to the 19th, users of TikTok started to get little notifications on their phone that says, hey, you can no longer use this app. It was removed from the App Store for us, folks. And while at the time of the recording this, you can now use it and you can download it, some people are claiming it technically isn't allowed. Okay, technically isn't allowed. Now, President Trump did say that he wants to reinstate TikTok primarily because he doesn't like Meta, and he's been very clear about this. Meta has also been clear about how they have not supported Trump up until now, which I will talk about because the drama is drama ing. But TikTok, President Trump wants TikTok because he actually helped him with his platform during his campaign. He likes their algorithm, and I will say, compared to Meta, the way that they allow conversations to happen is much different than Meta's algorithm, whatever they try to claim. And Trump likes that. He likes the free speech, let's put that loosely, in quotes. Okay? For TikTok. So despite being unavailable for about 16 to 18 hours on the 19th, TikTok is restored in the US and they're working on an appeal right now, though Apple and Google still do not have TikTok in there in the app stores. Okay, so they don't want to be, you know, sued or fined or whatever. Okay? But if you already have it, you already have it. Apparently there is a 75 day probationary period where someone can still come in and purchase it, but time will tell. Time will tell. So the aftershocks of this are really everything else we're seeing in social media news, because I don't think people quite thought it would get this far because this, again, this isn't the first time TikTok has been under threat of a ban, but this is the first time that it's gotten this far. Okay, so thing one that happened is a smaller thing. YouTube. YouTube has increased the length of YouTube shorts, so YouTube shorts are now three minutes long instead of 60 seconds. One minute used to be the max, now it's three minutes. This is in a direct response to TikTok, and it's my prediction that if TikTok is to be banned, which now is looking more likely than not like if it will in 75 days completely disappear or if it will be purchased or whatever will happen. YouTube is, in my opinion, the natural replacement for TikTok for a number of reasons. One, it is the largest video platform in the world. It's the second largest search engine. So this idea that TikTok was for search, which people really liked, we can easily take that concept into YouTube. They've got the bones there. YouTube's algorithm, especially for suggested content has always been great. Okay, like if you watch this video about tomato plants, maybe you'll like that video about tomato plants. Okay. It's been, it's been great over the years. YouTube does not have the drama that other platforms have and the, shall we say, negative associations with the algorithm. So like right now people aren't happy with Instagram or Facebook's algorithm. It's not fun over there for those of us on those apps, on all those platforms. So YouTube feels like the natural like king of video here and I'm here for it. I would actually love to see YouTube shorts be the thing. It's a terrible name. TikTok has like a nice cutesy little, oh, here's a YouTube video or here's a TikTok that I watch. YouTube shorts. If it's, it's YouTube shorts, the shorts piece is like not easy for me to say. And if I'm just like texting you YouTube short, I may just say a YouTube video instead. I also hesitant because we do have long form video on YouTube. The three minute video, to me, I don't know how I feel about it. I like a short being short and three minutes does not feel short to me. If someone sent me a three minute video and I didn't like it, I'd be like, man, this feels like a long video, right? 60 seconds, perfect. Beautiful. I liked the time limit. So we shall see. We shall see. YouTube to me is like the natural next replacement for TikTok. So that's the second update, third update. Instagram and Meta. Let's talk about meta. Largely at first. Meta has over the years, specifically since President Trump's campaign initially and then his first term of presidency, they have been very clearly not a fan. Okay? They've banned him from the platforms. They've put in, you know, things in place that are directly a call out to him. Things like, you know, if someone shares fake news, they have automations or they did that would say this, you know, this story has not been fact checked. You know, check your sources. And so meta has been very specific about labeling things as fake news. Labeling things as, you know, make sure to check your sources. This has been a direct response to President Trump. Okay. And Zuck, Zuck and co. The Zuckerberg has not been a fan. Okay. That changed recently with the. One of their updates that they did last week, which was they were removing the automated fact checkers. And upon first glance, I thought this wasn't that bad of a thing. X, formerly known as Twitter, has this in place. It's called Community Notes. It's based on how the community responds to whatever is being posted. So the consensus basically is like, if somebody posts something and it is factually incorrect, as a collective, we could say this is wrong. And then there'll be a little note like, it's like a lot of people disagree with this or a lot of people say that this is factually incorrect. Upon first glance, I was like, that doesn't seem too terrible because between you and I, to be honest, some of the automations are not great. And what was happening with. I saw this numerous times with some of my clients, some of my members, is that you would post something that wasn't fake, that wasn't, you know, inaccurate, but the automation would think it was, and your account will get trapped in this automated hell, basically, and you would get flagged, your account would get banned and you'd have no idea what happened because it was like a robot gone rogue. Very frustrating. So for me, when I see that, I'm like, oh, okay, so power back to the people. I love it. However, it is a very slippery slope. Slippery slope. And it can be very dangerous for the collective as well, I think, especially for bullying for any sort of hate against other group, a minor, a minority group, it can go sideways very, very quickly. I think about certain, certain things, like anti Semitic comments, right? If a whole bunch of, let's say, can I say Nazis of a whole bunch of people who think poorly of a certain group of people collectively decide to bully someone, then the community could decide that post needs to be removed, taken down, whatever, when it shouldn't be right. I think about this with, like LGBTQ folks. Like, there's so many ways this can go wrong. If, as a collective, someone gangs up, cancels someone based on their existence, their mere existence, this could go sideways very, very quickly. And so it is dangerous for meta to do this. But they've done it, and they've done it perfectly timed a week before President Trump was inaugurated into office for his second term. So are they connected? I mean, they're not going to come out and say that directly. But the fact that Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan's podcast to talk about this says a lot. Because, yeah, it just says a lot. It says a lot. The timing of it all says a lot. What it says to me is that Meta is going, oh, new man in power. We need to suck up to the new man in power. And it seems like, you know, a lot of people want him to be because, hello, they all voted for him to be. And so we want to follow that, that thread, okay, Follow the money, if you will. Again, not a new strategy for a social media platform, but here we are. So that is the news on that. So we've got TikTok being banned. We've got YouTube increasing their YouTube shorts. We've got Meta releasing their algorithmic automation for moderating fake news and that sort of thing and putting the power back to the people, which could be very bad. And then we have some other changes happening in Meta. And this again is because TikTok is being banned and Meta is trying to like poach those people over to, you know, Facebook and Instagram and maybe threads, Instagram reels and Instagram the grid. So when you're looking at your Instagram feed, you know how you had like the aesthetic, like, oh, my profile is. Everything is like color coordinated. The size has changed. It's no longer Square, it's a 4 by 5 size. It's 1080 by 1350. So a little bit more vertical, little bit more, you know, portrait, if you will. A little bit more hot dog. Okay, if you will. So it has changed now. And if you have not been using this new size, your feed looks all sorts of messed up now. I've been using this new size for a while. I've been telling my members to use this new size for a while. However, when I make a new template, I make it as a square. I don't know if it's just because I've been doing this for 10 years now, but like squares reign supreme for me. They always have. And so a lot of even my templates in my template bundles squares. However, that's not the new size anymore. It's this new 4 by 5 size that looks like the elongated profile, to be honest. Kind of looks like your TikTok profile where you have, you know, you have the videos, right? You have the portrait size videos on your profile. Instagram is now, okay, bet we're gonna do that too. That's what Instagram says. So if you go and look at your feed on your profile and looks all sorts of messed up and things are cropped weird. That is why Instagram's trying to be like TikTok yet again this is not new news. They're just, you know, a little mimicker. Again, I've been using this size since 2023. I look back at my canva files. I've been using the size since 2023 but I did not think they would change the profile. So while my profile for the most part looks fine, my pinned posts are a little messed up. I need to fix those. But my profile for the most part right now looks fine. On my main, I have like my, you know what, what are the kids call it? My Finsta. Like my secondary account that I use for other things. I didn't bother with that one. It's all messed up so I have to redo it anyways. Such is life. If you're with me, we have work to do or if you don't care, just leave it. And going forward from today, use the new S 1080 by 1350. Another thing for meta is that they also increase their reels length of three minutes. Okay, again this is copying. YouTube did it first, now reels they've been testing longer length. So if you've had this available, it may not be new to you, but it is something that they have been testing and they now officially have have released to the majority of people on the app. Again, they're trying to poach people from TikTok even though people are still over on TikTok and having a grand old time over there. So with that being said, I want to also talk about some alternatives to TikTok because I've been seeing this photoground a lot of questions about like oh, if TikTok is banned, where are we going? That's been the big question. If TikTok is banned, where are we going? And I said earlier in this episode, I believe YouTube and YouTube Shorts is the natural answer. To me, if you're creating video content, go to the place where people are already watching video content. Okay. It's a natural next step. However, if you want to explore some of the other apps, I want to give you my thoughts. You didn't ask for them, but here they are. I tried this weekend fan based. I swear when I first logged in my feed was just only fan creators and I was like nothing against this but this is not I'm here for work, not pleasure. If you catch my drip. So it was a little bit startling. I did set my preferences and I started following people. My algorithm quickly Picked it up. But it feels very much geared towards people giving you money for the, for the things that you post. Like when I log into the app, there's, there's a thumbs up option which is like, yeah, I like this video. But then there's a heart option where it costs money to like give people hearts. I didn't like that. But I was able to import over my Instagram profile. And so all of my Instagram videos, all of my posts were imported, my profile and everything I imported over. And I was like, okay, that doesn't seem so bad. But then now I have another app to check and y'all know how I feel about that. Not a fan. Two others that I've tried in the past that kind of seem like they had a little bit of resurgence this week. One is Lemon eight. Now, I will say this, Lemonade is a sister company to TikTok. So when TikTok was like having its moment, this, or I guess it'll be a couple weeks, weekends ago by the time this comes out, Lemonade was also having a moment. You weren't. You couldn't. You can't download it, you can't access it because it's a sister company. Same with Cap Cut. Cap Cut is a sister company to TikTok, so they all are owned by the same parent company. So if TikTok's not allowed, eliminate is not allowed and Cap Cut is not allowed as well. The other one is Clapper. Clapper has been around for a hot minute. I downloaded clapper Last time TikTok was threatened to be banned. And again, very similar to TikTok. It's a terrible name though. It sounds like a UTI or not a UTI. It sounds like a STI. I'm like, all right, terrible name for an app. But let's see, I have three videos on there and they don't, they don't have bad views. They're from years ago though. Let's see, when Was this posted? 2023 again. Last time TikTok was threatened to be banned, I published on there. I may publish again, I may not. I think that it's just another place for me to check. And honestly, I'm not, I'm not that mad at Meta. I, I don't fully believe what the company believes, but my people are there. And while it's not a safe space, I found safe spaces, if that makes sense. So I, I go where my people are. Last thing I will say is this. At the time of recording this too, one of my members shared with me this update about Instagram's new editing app. It is again, a direct, direct competitor to Capcut. It is called Edits. And it's all about editing Instagram videos, specifically reels. And I haven't tried it yet. But I will say this. Instagram is terrible for editing and I don't believe them creating an entirely different app will solve the issue. I don't know, I'm not an app designer. But something to consider is that meta is actively trying. They're trying now. If YouTube came out with a video editing app, I would be here for it because I feel like YouTube again, I do strongly believe YouTube is like the biggest contender here and that's where I would put my eggs if I were to. And I probably will put my focus on YouTube over Meta products. So that's the update. Holy bananas. We've got TikTok being banned. We have YouTube starting to dominate. I mean, they already dominate YouTube, like fully stepping into their short video form, video roles. We've got Meta doing all sorts of things with quote unquote, free speech and power to the people. We've got Instagram profiles changing new editing apps, people trying alternative places. It's a lot if you're sitting here going, andrea, I still don't know what the heck to do. Here's my advice. Keep doing what you're doing because at the end of the day, not a lot has changed. I do see people like doing a mass exodus of meta products. For instance, I do see people downloading their TikTok videos and taking them somewhere else. But majority of people are staying exactly where they are. The majority of people are staying exactly where they already are. And I think this is the challenge with going to new apps is that you then become, you become a small fish in a big pond again. And you're essentially starting from scratch. Not only with, you know, trying to bring your, your community members over, but you're also starting from scratch in learning a new app. And while there are benefits to being power user in a new app, I talk a about this a lot with threads and like my initial experience with threads, very delightful. Because, you know, being a power user in a new app is, it puts you in a, in a, in a really good position, right? But a lot of us, my people, y'all listening to this, we don't have time for this, right? We're running our business. Plus we've got the kids, we've got our parents, we've got our friends, we've got daycare drop off, we've got We've got so many other things to figure out. Right. Life. Life is life in chronic illness. Like, if this is completely overwhelming to you, I want to let you know you don't have to worry about it. I saw this, A lot of conversation around this on Facebook. There's a lot of beautiful Facebook groups that I'm in where a lot of people are having these really deep and rich conversations about should we leave Facebook or not? And the consensus for a lot of people has been we don't agree with this app. We're going to be very vocal about some of the changes, but ultimately my people are here and. And we've decided to make the decision to vocally disagree with some of the policies and still remain here. Okay. So if you're feeling like. If you're feeling like this is a lot and I don't want to change anything, don't change anything. But if you do, YouTube, I think, is a really good place to focus. And I do think like there's meta just has the most users, most people on it. So if you are on meta, kind of gonna stay on meta. For me personally, I will still continue to use Tick Tock. It will still continue to repurpose content there and use it as like, my fun place to hang out sometimes, but I may start switching that over to YouTube more and more. And I will continue to explore new apps and bring you my findings as I find them. Ah, thank you so much for listening and tuning in and watching this episode of the Mindful Market Marketing Podcast. I'll be back at you next week with a new episode. Until then, bye for now.