Will TikTok be banned? How Miami influencers are responding
Tour guide and West Kendall native Carolina Florez has 6,000 followers on TikTok. A video of her tour of Opa-locka has gotten 66,000 views.
The visibility that comes with those numbers could soon disappear with the app itself.
“It’s concerning that the U.S. government doesn’t want us to have this freedom of speech,” said Florez, 28. “It feels a little [like] North Korea to me.”
Florez is one of many Miami content creators preparing for the potential U.S. ban of TikTok. In April, President Joe Biden signed legislation requiring Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19, 2025. If it is not sold by Jan. 19, the app will no longer be available for download in the United States and will be banned on U.S. internet browsers.
Florez has been creating content since she was 15 with Windows Movie Maker, a video-editing program. After being laid off from her job as a salesperson in the shipping industry during the pandemic, she became a full-time tour guide. Creating content for Instagram and TikTok allowed her to document her work in an inventive way.
In addition to leading tours, Florez spends between 10 to 20 hours a week creating content for social media, something that helps her earn money via paid sponsorships and by reaching clients who book private tours.
“I like to balance out creating content with doing tours, because although content creation makes a lot more money, I think that doing tours is more enjoyable,” she said.
But recently, negative comments on her content have soured Florez’s perception of the app. In the last two years, she said she has created less TikTok content for that reason. As an Instagram user with 33,000 followers, she has noticed different behavior from users of the two apps.
“The problem with TikTok is you’re just scrolling, and you’re not paying attention to one person,” she said. “You see [that person] as this performer. That’s where people get the different attitudes.”
But the potential TikTok ban has not stopped Florez from creating social media content entirely. She believes TikTok enthusiasts may pivot to Instagram if there is a ban, amplifying the viewership of Instagram content.
“It has brought a level of awareness to me that platforms come and go, like Vine,” she said. “If something like this happened on Instagram and I wasn’t [on another platform], I would be screwed. I think, for right now, I would be OK.”
Hollywood resident Lisset Tresvant has used various social media platforms, including TikTok, for years and found ways of connecting online with her customers. Tresvant, 39, is the owner of Glow Esthetics Skin Studio, a business that educates consumers on skin care and wellness.
Having worked as a makeup artist before her full-time turn into entrepreneurship in 2017, she began by showcasing her work on Facebook and received clients from there who wanted her $10 makeovers.
In early 2019, Tresvant made a TikTok profile and immediately fell in love with the app. Tresvant had previously built an Instagram Shop for people to buy her skincare products but considered it complicated to the one she was able to build on TikTok. In the time she had her Instagram shop, she only earned between $200 and $300 in sales, compared to the $10,000 her TikTok Shop has made in the year it’s been open.
“I love TikTok,” she said. “My account is monetized.”
But Tresvant believes that it is easier to go viral on TikTok than it is to gain followers. While she has one video that received 6.3 million views, she only has about 5,300 followers and noticed that the video’s success did not translate into a huge growth in her follower count.
“TikTok is a place where it’s harder for someone to follow you,” she said. “Sometimes when you watch someone once, you don’t necessarily have to follow them.”
Creating an email list through Flodesk, an email marketing platform, has allowed her to communicate with her audience in a more direct and efficient way that she has control over, compared to TikTok. Tresvant has 6,000 people on her email list and 2,000 subscribers to her text list and said she has earned $200,000 off of her email list alone.
Tresvant’s email subscribers buy products and book appointments through her emails. She manages her sales via Shopify and has leveraged her social media following into gaining new subscribers for the lists. New subscribers receive a free e-book on skincare, the “GLOWBABE Skin Bible,” she said.
“All you have to do is subscribe for free,” she said. “I love TikTok, but if it was to go right now, I’d be fine because I’ve gotten so many people to subscribe to my email list.”
With TikTok’s future in question, other users have already begun limiting their activity on the app. Marvel Bishop, a luxury concierge in Brickell, said that when he heard TikTok might not be around anymore, he stopped creating content for the app.
Across platforms, creating content around his work in nightlife and hospitality has allowed Bishop, 38, to humanize himself to potential clients and collaborators and provided another avenue to mentor other entrepreneurs about how to attain and serve high-income clients. He is a proponent for another social media platform — YouTube.
“YouTube [has] the biggest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) outside of Google,” he said. “ ... YouTube is not going anywhere anytime soon.”
Like Florez and Tresvant, Bishop said diversifying one’s content creation is an important strategy for success. He knows many entrepreneurs with aggressive content development outputs who are mainly reliant upon TikTok.
“It does suck for a lot of content creators because I know other creators that make tens of thousands of dollars a month [using TikTok],” he said.
As Florez prepared to lead a tour on Calle Oche on a recent weekday, she said she was confident that her overall business will remain stable even if TikTok is banned.
“I’ll figure something out,” she said. “I’m a very adaptable person. At the end of the day, I have built a reputation outside of building content that makes me great money.”
This story was originally published January 9, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
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