Social media marketers have found very fertile soil for their efforts on TikTok in recent years. But with last month’s passage of legislation mandating the sale of the company’s US operations by Chinese-headquartered ByteDance, the future of that platform – and its ads – is very much in doubt.

So far, the Chinese government has opposed the sale, and it has the capability to block it outright on the pretense of export control. ByteDance is challenging the US legislation in court, but if that case fails, TikTok will have to change hands or effectively be cut off for any American users not accessing it through a VPN.

An outright ban on the sale seems unlikely, given the amount of money that it would surely bring to the Chinese company. But the likeliest alternative would probably not appear much different to existing users or to the social media marketers attempting to reach them.

The Chinese government’s opposition to the sale presumably has much less to do with the brand or the TikTok user base than the proprietary technology behind it. The thing that makes TikTok so appealing, especially to young consumers, and thus so appealing to social media marketers, is its content recommendation algorithm. This would almost certainly be stripped from app ahead of any sale, so although TikTok may continue operating inside the US, the user experience would be very different unless the new American owners were able to emulate the prior success of Chinese coders.

That certainly is not impossible, but it’s not something that social media marketers can take for granted when thinking about the future of their ads on the platform. Until this entire situation reaches its conclusion, those social media marketers will have to cope with the uncertainty and design contingency plans for each possible outcome.

There is a possible future in which existing marketing campaigns are allowed to carry on without necessary alterations. But on the opposite extreme, there is a looming threat that social media marketers will have no choice but to bring an end to one entire element of their strategy and shift their attentions toward other platforms that are either already established or up-and-coming in the United States.

Barring either of those outcomes, the present uncertainty would only become greater for the foreseeable future. A new, American-owned TikTok could prove to be as valuable to social media marketers as the Chinese-owned app is today, or it could end up being completely inferior. It is also possible that the relative value won’t be clear at all, and that social media marketers will mostly be tasked with adapting to a lateral shift, where algorithms and user experiences are different in ways that benefit some advertisers while impeding others.

Unfortunately, until the legal challenges and buyer proposals play out, there’s not much more that we can say to social media marketers. Although we recognize that “wait and see” may not be very exciting or satisfying advice, we can promise that One Brick Tech will be available to help its clients fully explore whatever opportunities TikTok presents to them in the future, whether it continues along the lines of its present success or transforms into something completely different.