A BIG reminder from the TikTokApocolypse you shouldn’t ignore

Where were you during the Great TikTok Shutdown of ‘25?

Were you watching all the influencers spill their last-minute secrets or, like me, were you drinking wine and making a digital index of your closet?

But in all seriousness: now that the dust has settled and we’re all tucked back into our smartphones, there’s something really important to take away from this:

Don’t count on social media to be the end-all-be-all of your income.

Meaning: if you’re making money on social media in any capacity, you need to have a strategy to build properties you own and control.

The TikTok Apocalypse reminded us we don’t own our social audience.

When TikTok shut down, it was a hard but practical reminder that we don’t own our social media profiles or audience. And if that’s your main revenue source, what happens to your business when it goes away?

Until now, the disappearance of social was kind of a like a little scary campfire story: oh, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg can wake up one day and rip Instagram out of your little cold hands!

And while it might not have been the TikTok CEOs who made the call, it proved it could happen.

How to protect your business from a social media shutdown

Hear me out: I’m not telling you to go out and build your own personal social media tool. But what I am encouraging you to do is to figure out how to capture your audience and keep them in your pocket regardless of the state of social platforms.

And what’s the best way to do that?

Create an email list.

Email lists are the most valuable way to capture your audience and keep yourself in their radar. Even if your email platform shuts down, you can keep a record of the addresses that have signed up, and then make the best decision to more forward.

It’s okay if you don’t have time to nurture it right this second. (Ideally, that’ll be a part of your long-term strategy, but I’d rather you at least start collecting emails.)

And once you have the signups, you have so much more freedom and opportunity to pull your business away from social and make something sustainable. At the very least, you’ll have a separate, complimentary revenue stream, and who doesn’t want that?

And now, a plug.

And now, because I’m gonna practice what I preach: wanna join my official audience? I promise the goods will be…well, good: