Dear LTK Creators,

I want to take the time to connect with you, our LTK Creator community, on the news yesterday that may lead to a potential ban of social entertainment platform, TikTok, in the coming year.

LTK was founded in 2011 to help Creators, like myself, be as economically successful as possible; that was our mission then and it still is today.

As founders, Baxter and I believe that it is our duty to be futurists—to predict and build for the future that we believe will become a reality.

When we started LTK, we were in the era of blogging, where consumers went to websites to see their favorite Creators. Then, we moved into the social media era, that fueled our industry—helping all of us find larger audiences. The problem with this era was that 1) a new platform popped up every 2 years and 2) their business model was deeply misaligned to us as Creators. Seeing that this trend was fragmenting, we decided to invest in a platform-agnostic homebase for LTK Creators. One that is purpose-built for your long-term business success, where you could collect followers from each of these new platforms and bring them home to your community home base—LTK.

We predicted the proliferation, evolution, and revolution of social media platforms, and we planned for days like today where we have learned that one of the apps with the largest consumer population may cease to exist. This is not surprising to us, and we, with you, are prepared for it.

TikTok has forever changed social media by demonstrating that consumers will spend more time in interest-based feeds than in community-driven feeds. Regardless of which platform you choose to reach consumers, you are operating in an environment that is built to entertain, not to build community.

What does that mean for you?

It means that now, more than ever, you are fishermen in a sea of entertainment platforms. LTK is your boat and you enter platforms to fish for new people who want to join your community, and you bring them into your boat.

Creators are the most rational way for marketers to invest, because you have something that cannot be bought—trust. The people that trust you are called your community, and to monetize that community you have to be able to access them.

LTK has released a suite of features that ensure your community is sticky, can grow, and will be nurtured. Just in the last few weeks we have released:

• Link Optimization: ensuring each shopper has a personalized, optimized flow from discovery to checkout. And it's working! Creators in the test group earned nearly $27M more, and didn’t have to do a thing.
• Post Subscriptions: doesn't it sound nice to be able to reach your audience on demand? Remind them to ring the bell and sign up for notifications when you post.
• Products Tab on your LTK: We know that your community loves to search through your database of content, and now they can see every product you have linked, click to see every post you have featured it in, and that experience is all LTK AI-enhanced to be personalized for them. You don’t have to do anything and your community gets a more efficient shopping experience.
• 10 minute video: In this new format, 10 minute videos are published in 1 minute segments so you can provide more context and build more trust with your community. These are wonderful for tutorials, how to’s, or just going deeper on any topic.