Gen Z’s dreams of TikTok fame may be closer than you think

RECENTLY, I walked by a playground where some kids were engaging in make-believe play. Yet, instead of pretending to be astronauts or superheroes, they were pointing their coin pouches at each other and acting as content creators.

Clearly, the content of influencers like Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, and Charli D’Amelio has captured the imaginations of a generation of social media users. Teens today are likely to have grown up in a world where YouTube and Facebook have existed for their entire lives.

These creators have not been shy about showing the amount of wealth they can earn from “having fun”. Some of MrBeast’s most popular videos include “$456000 Squid Game In Real Life!” and “I Ate A $70,000 Golden Pizza”.

A survey conducted by Adobe on 9,000 Gen Z creators across 9 countries found that slightly less than half of them hope to own a business and make money from the content they shared online.

With so much interest in content creation, some may still be doubtful of how realistic such dreams of stardom really are.

Yet, viral marketing adviser Alicia Chia, believes that with consistency and an understanding of what viewers want to see, anyone with a decent smartphone can achieve some success creating content.

After all, the 26-year-old managed to achieve virality herself. Since she started her TikTok account on April Fool’s Day this year, she has amassed more than 200 million views in 4 months. To date, she has also gained more than 326,000 followers and 12.1 million likes.

A former intern and full-time employee with TikTok for over 2 years, Chia left the company in August last year after she felt burnt out at the company, just as many others were during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Instead of immediately rejoining the workforce, she decided to take a break to create some content on TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn with what she had learnt from her time working on creator partnerships and community at her former workplace.

Soon after, she found that a number of her friends and ex-colleagues were reaching out to work with her on social media marketing for their startups. This then led to her starting her own viral marketing advisory to work with these companies.

However, just as the business was taking off, the Russia-Ukraine conflict began, which led to 2 of her largest clients dropping her services as their engineering teams were based in the region.

“I was a bit lost because that was literally my one and only income source and suddenly, with this war coming, I didn’t know when it would improve,” she shared.

Instead of giving up, she doubled down and used her skills to launch her own TikTok channel so that she could show potential clients that her methods do work. Since then, the numbers speak for themselves.

“When I see my content go viral, a lot of comments come in like…’oh, this is so funny’ or ‘you made my day’; it makes me happy to be able to make people happy,” she said.

Chia’s videos, which tend to make up silly content set to snippets of songs and other sound effects, are not just for fun either.

After just 3 months, she received her first sponsorship opportunity with video tutorials and analytics provider vidIQ, with more to come in the next few weeks. Minimally, her sponsorship deals attract a low 4-figure fee, which is paid in one lump sum with a bonus if a video exceeds a certain number of views.

She also believes that anyone should be able to achieve her level of success if they persist in content creation, even if the larger sponsorships still go to the likes of Jianhao Tan and Naomi Neo, who have attracted millions of followers across different social media platforms online.

“In reality, most content creators actually have full-time jobs and content creation is more like a side hustle for them.

“In the Singapore context, actually a lot of brands are very happy working with just micro-creators — those with only a few thousand followers — but of course, for a much-smaller fee,” Chia said.

Speaking to Chia, I found that a lot of her tips are applicable to our daily lives as well.

For instance, she has created workflows for herself to brainstorm and film videos ahead of time so she can create videos ahead of time without the pressure of looming deadlines hurting her creativity.

One way she does this is by batching her brainstorming, filming and editing work so she feels more productive. That way, she is able to post a video almost once every 2 days.

Just as with any other investments, she is also diversifying her efforts into other social media platforms beyond TikTok.

In June, her TikTok account was actually taken down because the platform thought that she was underaged. By then, she had already amassed almost 150,000 followers and 60 million video views.

Her experience is not unique to her as the system is automated. In the first 3 months of 2021, TikTok removed more than 7 million accounts in a bid to weed out underaged users. Fortunately, she was able to make a successful appeal to the platform to retrieve her account and its videos.

“If you only have one platform and the platform gets bad, all of a sudden your career is gone. It’s like getting fired for no reason,” she said.

As for her advice on what makes good TikTok content, it lined up very well with what my news writing professor told us on day 1 of class: “You are less interesting than your mum tells you you are.”

“A very common mistake that I see a lot of people making is that they like to treat their TikTok profile as a personal diary so the content on their profile surrounds themselves,” Chia noted.

“It shouldn’t always be about you, but about what your community wants from you,” she said, adding that it is important for budding creators to understand what their viewers vibe with.

And finally, perhaps the most important tip of all would be to just start creating content.

“As you create content, there will definitely be brands and marketers who come across the content and reach out to you,” Chia said, adding that creators may get some form of affiliate income from brands through promo codes attached to their videos, even if they are not directly monetised.

With her advice, maybe Gen Z’s dreams of mild TikTok fame could grow beyond the confines of make-believe playground games.