Alright. Coming to you live from my home office slash studio. And you know what? There's another win warning. Last time I said there was a wind warning. I don't wanna jinx anything, so I'm gonna knock on my desk made of wood. Yeah. Hopefully, this wind is not affecting the power. I did not get a notice that the power will be out here in Los Angeles, but hoping that this wind is not like the last time. So today, I wanna talk about making peace with platforms. This past weekend, TikTok went dark here in the US of a. And I was actually pretty surprised at the reactions. A lot from my dad actually, who's a big TikTok consumer. He was like, Dylan, what do you think? What's gonna happen? You know, he's gonna stress it out because he likes his TikTok. And I saw a lot of posts from people saying that they were, you know, bumped that TikTok was gone. People were saying things I was, like, pretty shocked at, honestly. They were just, like, having meltdowns from what I read. And they were looking for workarounds using VPNs and nothing was really working. And then in the early hours of Sunday, TikTok comes back. But if you had deleted the app, it's really hard to get it back. So it seems like it's kind of a rollback of what happened from what I've read that they might have switched servers, which is, like, causing a delay in getting the service back up and running. Also, you can't download the app as of when I'm recording this right now from the App Store, the Apple App Store, or the Google Play Store. So if you had it already on your phone, then you can use it again. But if you deleted it, then you can't get it again. And I'm in both camps because I have 2 phones. One phone, I didn't delete TikTok on, and I can access it. I can access CapCut, all that good stuff. On my other phone, I deleted the app because I was like, you know what? I'll just download it again. Well, I deleted the app, and I can't download it again. So I have it on one phone, not on the other. And, yeah, what did we learn from it being out? Well, if you aren't a TikTok user or creator, then you weren't affected by it at all. In fact, strange enough, most people I speak with aren't TikTok consumers or creators. And TikTok for me is like a kind of an afterthought. Now with my company content clips, I track where all my business comes from and any of my clients. Like, I have a label in my, spreadsheet of clients and I know where they came from. So a lot of them came from TikTok. Also, a lot of them have come from, referrals who started on TikTok. So TikTok has been good to content clips and lead generation. And I just kinda wanted to go through in this episode and share my mindset around TikTok, but more so zooming out as platforms as a whole because I think I have a pretty healthy relationship with the social media channels. And I just wanna offer my look at it. So is TikTok coming back? Is it gone for good? Who knows? I'm not gonna say who cares because a lot of people rely on TikTok. But you have to treat these platforms like they could leave at any time. Right? The algorithm's always changing. You don't have a permanent algorithm on any of these platforms. You know? You post something and you hope that it gets traction and that it lands in front of your audience, all that stuff, but you have very little control. And the reasons for that, the platforms, this is the biggest misconception. The platforms, their goal is to generate revenue. Right? They are a company, like TikTok is a company. It wants to make money. It makes 1,000,000,000 of dollars every year. For creators, their platform is what? Getting views on videos, growing their audience, connecting with people, things like that. That's not the same goal as the platform. The platform uses the attention it gets from creators posting to generate the revenue, but the goal is revenue generation. Right? Like, that's, like, the number one goal. The creator doesn't necessarily care how much revenue a platform creates, right? Like, if TikTok made $30,000,000,000 this year, does it matter that much to you than if they made $10,000,000,000 Not really, right? But if you as a creator, got 30,000,000 views this year versus, like, 30,000, that would make a difference to you because your audience would grow. You'd have more opportunities, things like that for the most part. And so just realizing, like, you don't have the same goals as the platforms. They wanna sell advertisement. In TikTok's case, they've really stepped into ecommerce. So they wanna do more ecommerce sales. But advertisement is like one of the main drivers. Right? Meta for Instagram and Facebook is mainly selling ads. Like ads are a huge part of their company. So they wanna make advertisers spend money on the platform and they do that by keeping people on the app. Right? So I'm kind of in the weeds here, but it's important to recognize that TikTok as a company has a different goal than TikTok creators. And TikTok creators are putting a lot of their eggs in one basket by saying, like, this is the most valuable platform. This is where I'm gonna be. And even though it's scary to put all my eggs on this platform, the platform has been so good to me that I can't really focus anywhere else. And I'm kind of in this tough situation because if TikTok goes away, my business takes a huge hit. And I've already built this thing that like I just need TikTok to keep going. And putting yourself in that position is just dangerous and irresponsible. And it's not just TikTok. It's all the platforms. Because like I'm saying here, the algorithms on the platforms will change. Expect the change. Don't be caught off guard when Instagram goes down, or TikTok goes off the app store again, or we find out, oh, it's gonna be 3 weeks before people can download TikTok again, which means there'll be less people on the app because still people are having trouble accessing it, which might affect your business. Or advertisers are scared to invest in ads on that platform, which could ultimately affect TikTok's revenue goals and could ultimately, like, hurt the platform long term. And also side note, I've been reading people that have access to TikTok. They're saying that the algorithm is different. They're not seeing the content that they used to see. So there's already kind of a culture shift with the new president coming in, restoring the app, and people having trouble accessing it, and it not being what it just was. Now that might bounce back quicker, but why bet on this stuff happening? Right? You have to be flexible. You have to be agile on how you approach this stuff. If we look at the, like, downside of diversifying yourself across different platforms, it really becomes an energy expenditure issue. Right? You're like, well, I I don't know. I mean, I barely have enough time to post on Instagram. But as I've said multiple times, sometimes I feel like a broken record. Why wouldn't you just post the same things you post on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube? I do it and I see no issue with it. And I have people that come in to work with me at content clips through consulting and they're like, oh, I found out about you on YouTube. Cool. Like, I don't spend a bunch of time trying to hyper optimize YouTube. I just often post the same thing that I posted on TikTok. I don't necessarily care where people will consume my short form videos. All I care is that they're resonating with people and that the people who I made them for are enjoying them. So whether that's on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, I don't really care. And if we look at the upsides of diversifying yourself across the platforms, you're just safer. You can stay flexible. If one platform algorithm switches up on you, add some new updates that maybe they don't align with what you're doing. Typically people's numbers will go up. Even if it seems like your numbers might go down on one platform, usually just like overthinking things and doubting yourself. So overall there's way more upside to diversify yourself across platforms. Now we're talking about social platforms. When we look at things like a podcast or email, you have far more control over, and those things aren't gonna be swayed by big sweeping changes. Now, you know, email could because you have things like Gmail introducing these inboxes that separate emails and things like that. Like, there are nuances within those platforms. But generally, historically speaking, email and podcast do not see as much volatility as social platforms do. So if you're looking for like a foolproof way to attack content in a way that is safer, less prone to disruption, and has a much higher upside for you to hit your goals, it looks like creating a podcast, utilizing email, and publishing across the main social channels, your Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Do you need to excel at every single platform? Absolutely not. Do you need to engage with people on every single platform? Absolutely not. Do you need to pick, like, 1 or 2 platforms that you would like to learn the nuances on so that you know that your content's kind of vibing, gelling with, like, the culture that's within that platform? Absolutely. That's part of making sure your message lands for the people that it's intended for. But obsessing over details and being like, well, I only reached a 1000 people on Pinterest last month. It's gonna do you no good if you don't post on there and you reach 0 people. And all it would have taken was out of the whole month, maybe a couple minutes, like 2 minutes to use a tool like Metricool or something to also include the video or photo that you're gonna upload to Instagram to also post it on Pinterest. So that's my little spiel for you, and you can use this TikTok ban as a warning sign even if you are someone who doesn't feel like you were impacted by the TikTok ban. But just as a reminder that these things will change. And it's your responsibility as a creator to have a solid foundation. And when these platforms change something, it shouldn't throw your business into disarray. You can still be powerful and you can still have control. And it starts by owning what you can own and making peace with the fact that these platforms, they're gonna change, but your message and your approach doesn't have to. That's all I got for today. I'll see you in the next one.