What seemed like a winning digital marketing strategy until a while ago, could turn out to be a marketing disaster for your business in the coming days.
More people going under quarantine with each passing day due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The only way that remains for businesses to keep in touch with consumers is through digital marketing. For this, there are multiple social media platforms that businesses can choose from. Depending on the target audience of your business, you can opt from the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to Snapchat and LinkedIn.
The newest entry in this arena is TikTok, a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming.
Globally popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, among many others, are banned in China. But a majority of the countries across the world have not put any ban on the Chinese social network TikTok as of yet.
However, many people across the globe today seem to be wanting to self impose a TikTok boycott even though their governments aren’t imposing any official ban on the Chinese social network.
This growing sentiment can be easily noticed on websites like Twitter and Facebook. All one needs to do is type ‘boycott TikTok’ in the search bar and there will be a flood of posts from users appealing others to delete their TikTok account and uninstall the app.
Due to the global spread of Coronavirus originating from China, social media platforms are abuzz with anti-China rants. One of the major triggers to such rants could be media reports that suggest the exotic wet markets of China, the very starting point of the Coronavirus pandemic, have been reopened and are functioning exactly like before. In these cramped wet markets, different species of wildlife are kept in close proximity to one another for hours, even species that would barely interact in the open. This makes such markets a potential hotbed for the birth of never seen before viruses.
Re-opening these wet markets give a false impression as though nothing has happened due to such markets and that there’s no reason for these markets to be shut down completely.
This has added fuel to the fire and people across the globe are seeing this as an irresponsible move by the Chinese. One of the latest people to lash out is Phillip Bryan Schofield, an English television presenter who works for ITV.
According to an express.co.uk report, Phil hit out: “Nothing really galvanises the world more than money, if we are to believe this virus originated in one of these exotic markets in Wuhan, it’s shut down the world.
“That’s a massive responsibility on the world and China and other areas that have these markets.”
Another influential person who expressed dismay towards the Chinese move to reopen exotic wet markets is Snapdeal’s co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl. Here’s what he tweeted upon learning about the same.
In order to make China realise its irresponsible behaviour that could potentially harm the people around the world (again), people are taking to social media to call for the boycott of all possible Chinese products and services.
The easiest casualty of this call seems to be Tiktok, although no official reports have come out yet that could indicate how many TikTok users have uninstalled the app and/or deleted their TikTok accounts.
If you continue to use TikTok as a part of your digital marketing strategy, it is likely that you will be swimming against the tide and it could do a lot of harm to your business. It would hence be wise to keep those TikTok marketing ideas at bay for now, as it could save your business from losing existing as well as new/potential customers.
(editor@thebigbinge.com)
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