TikTok’s Golden Opportunity

With Facebook beset by Apple’s tracking crackdown, TikTok can capitalize. But will it?

Alex Kantrowitz
Marker

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Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Marshall Maher just wants TikTok to take his money. The chief marketing officer at ServiceUp, a car repair startup, spends $40,000 to $80,000 on ads each month, and he’s tired of giving it to Facebook. Maher doesn’t trust the social network after years of its error-filled reporting, especially now that Apple severed its ability to track people outside its app. He’s looking at TikTok to take its place.

“Facebook and Instagram are becoming very inefficient for us,” Maher said. “We need to do something else.”

TikTok today has a golden opportunity to take market share from Facebook, the kind that doesn’t come around too often. After Apple effectively broke Facebook’s ad system by cutting off crucial tracking capabilities — the social network’s measurement can now be off by as much as 60%, per some marketers — people like Maher are looking for alternatives. TikTok, with its massive, engaged user base, can sometimes be all they can talk about.

“This is 100% TikTok’s moment to scale,” said Sara Livingston, head of customer solutions at Rockerbox, a marketing analytics company. Facebook’s travails may lead more marketers to test budgets with TikTok, she said, and if their ads prove…

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