During one of my TikTok LIVEs, I was discussing The Crown Act and that users should sign the petition if they haven’t yet. As soon as I mentioned The Crown Act’s website, my LIVE was flagged. Thinking this was an error that TikTok’s AI made, I requested an appeal. TikTok responded that,”my LIVE is not eligible for recommendation and is restricted in search results, because it redirects users to purchase products outside TikTok”. The number of people viewing tanked as I continued my LIVE, and as a result, the clips of the LIVE I posted had low views.
I’ve done many LIVEs on TikTok where I discussed my small business’ products and referred users to my TikTok shop. The difference here is that referring my audience to my TikTok shop directs them to a space within the app. On their app, they can uphold creator content to their community guidelines. There is a heavy emphasis placed on their commitment to trust, safety, and integrity. TikTok can verify and maintain the content in my TikTok shop; they can’t do that for external sources.
The benefits of TikTok shop, for app users, are that there are rigorous rules placed on businesses attempting commerce on their app. In order to list any products, businesses must share their EIN and tax documents to prove their legitimacy. They also have to share product labels, product photos, and respond to any prompts that the platform may request before approving an item to our storefront. TikTok wants to make sure that anything being sold on their app maintains their commitment to user safety.
For content creators, the benefits of TikTok shop are proper promotion of their content by the app. Creators can make posts about the product, whether informational or showing how it can be used. This post can include the link to their TikTok shop that will bring users to their online storefront. During LIVEs, any products located in a creator’s TikTok shop could be mentioned, and the product would be shown to the audience to encourage them to click and enter the creator’s shop. There is also an advertising opportunity where a creator can make an advertising sprint for a product, and its reach will be boosted.
But if we look deeper into why TikTok or any other social media platform does not encourage external link sharing, we see that they simply do not want creators to direct traffic off of their app. The Science of Social Media podcast shared the episode, Why you shouldn’t add links to your social posts. After researching different social media platforms’ responses to content with external links, it was found that sharing external links negatively affects the content’s reach and impressions. Tweets with a link have 28% reach, which is significantly less than tweets that do not have a link.
This newfound information is great for business owners to use to tailor how they promote their products. But for the organizations whose product can not be added to a platform’s E-store, what should they do? Maintaining an emphasis on in-person events would be best for organizations. This makes their online community tight-knit and full of their supporters who would independently find the links outside of the app. Just because we can share a link in any post does not take away from the power of in-person word of mouth.
An experiment that an organization should conduct would be to create an authentic content post that will have a link, watch its performance organically, and then pay for the post to be boosted to collect its performance metrics. We understand that social media is a “pay to play” space, but we are still learning where paying for views may be necessary. A social media app may attempt a moral approach as to why they do not reward content with links, but what would it mean if they can be paid to look the other way?