Social media marketing has always been fraught with uncertainty. For as long as there have been multiple, highly popular platforms, questions have swirled regarding which of them might provide the best long-term opportunities for brand promotion. It’s something we’ve discussed in many previous social media marketing blog posts, with an emphasis on demographic differences, consumer trust, and so on.

But presently, social media marketing professionals and social media users as a whole are confronting a whole new kind of uncertainty. While the danger has always existed that certain platforms might fade into obscurity over time like Myspace and Google Groups, recent developments have raised the possibility of a platform being abruptly yanked out of a national market by government fiat.

In the wake of congressional hearings over the implications of data harvesting and retention by Chinese-owned TikTok, there are serious concerns that new legislation could make the micro-video sharing app inaccessible to all Americans. Some proposals even go so far as to criminalize the use of virtual proxy networks or other technical workarounds to continue using a banned social media platform. This is so unprecedented that some experts are anticipating a fundamental transformation of the online landscape.

Indeed, the potential loss of TikTok is only one potential consequence of growing government-level concern over the sharing and handling of user data. There is little doubt that social media marketing will be impacted, perhaps in ways that few anticipated. But the details and extent of that impact remain to be determined, so it is difficult to prescribe a specific contingency plan for businesses whose marketing strategies currently rely upon in-danger platforms or practices.

To the extent that TikTok is in danger, it will no doubt send many social media marketing professionals scrambling to come up with new alternatives for promoting their clients to young consumers. As this blog has pointed out, the Chinese-owned platform has retained a strong presence among Generation Z and was poised to be a point of entry for social media marketing among even younger users who are just beginning to become a viable demographic.

If TikTok disappears overnight, where will those users go? There’s no clear answer to this, and even if there were, we would still have to ask whether the social media marketing techniques that worked on TikTok will work on the new platform as well.

Even before the aforementioned congressional hearings, social media marketing firms already had to wrestle with these questions, albeit with somewhat less urgency, when Elon Musk assumed ownership of Twitter. That shakeup led to extensive speculation about a mass exodus from the platform, with users suggesting several alternatives. But none of these could realistically be expected to simply take the place of a long-established platform, overnight.

The various threats to TikTok, Twitter, and even Facebook only underscore the fact that there are no easy fixes when it comes to re-orienting a social media marketing campaign. Ultimately, the best thing that clients and professionals can do is try to diversify those campaigns as much as possible, and thus avoid falling into a situation where one’s single most important tool is suddenly snatched away and they are left with no other way of reaching their audience.