The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
TikTok could be banned in the United States on Sunday, which could impact how many Ohio small businesses reach customers.
Hoggy’s BBQ, which opened in 1991, has been using TikTok since 2020 and posts daily videos that gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant. Their videos range from breaking down their recipes to going through various items on the menu.
“We’ve worked really hard on it,” said Kyle Turner, the restaurant’s director of marketing and business. “It’s not the end of the world. We will survive and we’re on the other platforms, which will help with marketing, but it will limit our reach. It’ll definitely hurt our marketing capacity a little bit.”
Small businesses have used TikTok to connect with customers in new ways.
“To have (TikTok) just sort of taken away all of a sudden could feel very alarming and just be a really difficult pill for many businesses to swallow, having built their following … and a real connection with those people on that platform,” said Alexa Fox, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Akron who teaches a social media marketing class.
President Joe Biden signed legislation into law last year that requires TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or the social media platform will be banned out of concern that ByteDance would share user data with the Chinese government or push propaganda and misinformation.
TikTok argues the ban would violate the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment free speech protection.
The United States Supreme Court heard arguments on banning TikTok last week and can make a decision at any moment. President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Monday and he recently called on the court to pause the ban from taking effect.
If the ban goes through over the weekend, new users would be unable to download TikTok. Current users would still have the app on their smartphones, but the app would eventually become not usable over time.
TikTok was released in 2016 and has grown to more than 1 billion monthly active users, including more than 170 million users in the U.S. — making it one of the most popular social media platforms. Other platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube Shorts also promote short-form videos, but that doesn’t necessarily mean accounts will have the same success they currently do on TikTok.
“To say it’s going to be a one-to-one comparison is probably not very accurate,” Fox said. “Other social media platforms have not been very successful at replicating the environment that TikTok offers in order to really build a large following and connect with people using the features that the platform offers.”
Hoggy’s BBQ
Hoggy’s BBQ has more than 27,600 followers on their TikTok account and they have posted a video every day for the past three and a half years.
“(TikTok) increased our visibility,” Turner said. “It introduced us to a lot of different ideas, different people, and it definitely played a major role in the success and the growth we’ve had the last five years.”
They didn’t want the restaurant’s TikTok account to be like a television commercial, he said.
“The main goal is just to have a face to the place, be authentic, and don’t be overly corporate,” Turner said.
Their TikTok has garnered national attention and even caught the eye of Texas Monthly’s BBQ Editor Daniel Vaughn, who paid a visit to Hoggy’s BBQ. People from Indianapolis, Detroit and Philadelphia have come to Columbus just to eat at Hoggy’s, Turner said.
“They literally drove from those places to come to eat Hoggy’s and drive back, which was pretty crazy to me, but really cool,” he said. “Before TikTok, we didn’t really have that.”
