Change: The Only Reliable Thing About Social Media

The fate of TikTok has been up in the air for a couple years now. Since Former U.S. President Joe Biden called for new ownership of the app in 2024, the country has been watching to see what happens to the video-forward social media platform.  

As of January, we have our answer. An ownership deal went through, and the platform is now primarily owned by a U.S.-led investor group, including Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake, while TikTok’s original owner, ByteDance, now owns 19.9%.  

This has, expectedly, resulted in some shifts on TikTok. While many people are having the same experience with the app as before, other users have reported algorithm changes, major app outages, and censorship or suppression of specific words or topics. Now, uninstalls of the app are up 150%; even large content creators are leaving. That said, active user levels have stayed flat overall. TikTok is sticking around for now, despite some instability at the present moment.   

What makes this moment even more interesting is that this isn’t the first time TikTok ownership questions have caused chaos. On January 19, 2025, TikTok users in the United States were met with a message saying that the app was unavailable. This caused widespread frustration, and took many TikTok users to another Chinese social media app called Rednote. Even though the TikTok ban only lasted 12 hours, within days Rednote was flooded with Americans starting to build up new platforms, trying to learn Chinese to use the app more efficiently, and vowing that they’d never go back to TikTok. After a few weeks passed, however, most users went back to TikTok like nothing had happened.  

We don’t know just yet how widespread the effects of this new ownership deal will be, but people have left the app and come back before, which makes me think about the only constant that exists on social media: change.  

I’ve written in the past about how much social media has changed over the years. What used to be simple photo sharing apps have turned into sources for news, shopping, and entertainment, all in the same place. It’s understandable that people are upset about the changes to TikTok since the deal went through, especially since it seems like there’s been so many issues in such a short time. But expecting social media to stay the same, no matter what, is a fool’s errand. The only reliable thing about social media is how frequently it changes, even when there isn’t controversy surrounding it. You’ll finally get a grasp on one app’s algorithm before it changes and you have to learn it all over again, or you’ll start gaining followers only for your views to start tanking.  

My advice for this? Diversify your social media presence.  

“Diversify your social media presence” is a fancy way of saying have more than one platform. Don’t just rely on one channel. You can still have a favorite (most of us do), just make sure not to put all your eggs in one basket.  

If you or your team have the bandwidth to come up with different strategies and content for each platform, go for it! But you need to repurpose your existing content for other apps, at the very least. Each platform has a range of different users and trends, and it isn’t worth missing out on an entire market just because an app is having issues. Chances are, things will bounce back, and you’ll be glad that you stuck it out.  

If the worst-case scenario does occur and your app of choice completely shuts down, you can take comfort in knowing that you were posting to other platforms the whole time and refocus on them instead.  

We don’t know what the future looks like for TikTok right now. It’s safe to say that the app won’t completely fall apart, at least not for a while, but there’s no way of knowing what’s going to happen. The good (yet inconvenient) news is we don’t know what the future looks like for any other social media app, either. People, the internet, and the world are constantly changing, and there’s no way to be able to account for everything. Until we learn how to predict the future, the best we can do is keep our heads down, keep making content, and keep adapting to changes as they come. There are going to be A LOT of them. 

So, whether you’re building something from the ground up or trying to sustain your progress and starting to feel a little whiplash, don’t worry. This is the environment we help brands navigate every day at BSM Partners.   

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About the Author

Cady Wolf is an Analyst at BSM Partners. She graduated magna cum laude with a degree in English from Brigham Young University-Idaho, and she currently lives in Rexburg, Idaho with her husband, their two cats, and pet tortoise. She loves animals and learning about how to help pet brands and pet parents alike.