Gary Vee to SMBs: Tik Tok May Come and Go, But Pay Attention Anyway

Gary Vaynerchuk, the entrepreneur turned social media evangelist, recommends that companies of all sizes who want to leverage the next big social media platform should familiarize themselves with the TikTok  video app.

Vaynerchuk, speaking at SAP’s Innovate LIVE event, which was live streamed to more than 50,000 viewers, recommended that every marketing-minded executive should put the TikTok video app on a must-have list that should already include Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn.

The short form mobile video app is popular among the younger generation – and that’s precisely why Vaynerchuk said that now is the time to start to leverage that medium. In other words, don’t dismiss it because you think teenagers aren’t your target audience.

“We are in a culture where people say no, without knowing if the answer is yes,” Vaynerchuk told host Ramon Ray. “You have never heard of a 16-year-old who has so much equity in their household, that when they see a piece of your content, they may bring that up at the dinner table?

“Do you not see the data that teenage girls now carry more weight than ever in their households, because moms want to be their daughter’s friend instead of their mom, and thus what [her daughter] thinks is part of the decision-making in the family household?

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“People are so one-dimensional, so quick to say no, for no reason. We just don’t innovate. We are fear-based, we are no-based. So many people say no without realizing that if they say yes, they can do a double leap frog.”

The TikTok video app has garnered a lot of attention recently because of fear that the Chinese company will violate U.S. privacy laws. The U.S. Treasury Department recently said it was going to start investigating TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance.

In a post-Innovate LIVE interview, Vaynerchuk said he thinks the concerns over the TikTok video app are overblown.

“The reality is, we need to be much more thoughtful,” Vaynerchuk said. “It is being investigated because it is a Chinese company, and we are in an absolute Cold War with China that we don’t admit.

“But, secondly, what privacy? In a world where Visa and Target and the IRS has been breached, every single American’s credit card and social security number is in play. So, the question is, what privacy does TikTok have access to? If it is spidering your phone to see everything else, what would it have?

“I believe privacy is the great overrated issue of our society that humans don’t care about anywhere close to the degree that they philosophically are supposed to care about it.

“But here’s my answer: It doesn’t matter what I think about TikTok’s upside potential is. If you are scared to use it because of privacy issues, then you should not use it.”

Vaynerchuk is an early adopter of leveraging social media platforms, such as TikTok video, as a marketing tool, eschewing more traditional methods of advertising and brand-building. He understands, he said, that marketers and C-suite executives are probably uncomfortable with changing their focus toward something with which they are less familiar. But we no longer live in the days of Mad Men; newspapers, after all, are dying.

“In a world where people are scared to spend money on something with which they don’t have a comfort level, I try to challenge them (to) understand that they are spending more money on stuff that they have ‘always’ spent money on,” Vaynerchuk said.

“The amount of money that is spent to sponsor a B2B conference in Las Vegas or Orlando, where you spend more money to build out the booth than you spent on LinkedIn ads in a year, is laughable in 2019.

“We are willing to run full-page ads in a print magazine … versus running 20 pieces of content on LinkedIn for a fraction of the price. So you have completely out of touch marketers, who are sitting in ivory towers playing political games for advancement, and know what is acceptable by the CEO and the board instead of making decisions on the consumer level and the reality of contemporary consumption.”

Even if the TikTok video app does not make it as a growing social media tool, Vaynerchuk said marketers should use the platform  now, to learn skills from producing videos in this manner. Those skills could help down the road.

“The reason that everybody should make a TikTok video is not because you have a product that is selling to 80 year-olds and you have 12 year-olds on the platform,” Vaynerchuk said. “But the real reason is that when you create for the platform, you may find a nuance there that three years later, may matter in storytelling on (another) platform that does age up and you can use that nuance.”