How To Make It Big Using Social Media

Rapper Emiway Bantai, lifestyle vlogger Mumbiker Nikhil, singer Voice of Ritu, and TikTok star Mr. Faisu are among India’s biggest social media stars. They spoke to us about the secret behind turning their passion into big money.

- David Britto & Riddhi Chakraborty

IF YOU ASK A 16-YEAR-OLD TODAY WHO THEY IDOLIZE OR WANT TO GROW UP TO BE LIKE, CHANCES ARE YOU WILL DISCOVER AN UNFAMILIAR NAME OR TWO – PEOPLE THAT AREN’T ACTORS, ROCK STARS OR POLITICAL FIGURES. CHANCES ARE YOU WILL FIND THAT THE AVERAGE YOUTH IN INDIA – LIKE EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD – FOLLOWS THE JOURNEY OF THE LOCAL ‘INFLUENCER’ MORE CLOSELY THAN THAT OF A GLOBAL MOVIE STAR. THIS HETEROGENEOUS GROUP INCLUDES EVERYONE FROM FASHION BLOGGERS, ‘YOUTUBE MUSICIANS,’ COMEDIANS, MOTO VLOGGERS, NEW-AGE RAPPERS AND MORE.

Although social media platforms have been bringing the world closer since the Orkut days, the idea of the ‘Internet celebrity’ has swept pop culture only recently with enterprising individuals marketing themselves and their social media profiles as brands. One of the earliest global social media successes stories was singer-songwriter Jeffree Star who, in the mid-2000s, used MySpace to promote his music, and went on to found his own cosmetics company Jeffree Star Cosmetics in 2014, which relied majorly on YouTube for marketing. Today, Star is one of the biggest beauty influencers on YouTube with earnings running into several millions of dollars.

The rise of ‘YouTubers’ (creators of lifestyle and comedy content) in the past few years witnessed the likes of Shane Dawson, Casey Neistat and desi-Canadian queen Lilly Singh dominating daily social media feeds of millions of users around the globe. Instagram contributed its share by producing an army of beauty guru bloggers like Huda Kattan (who would go on to found beauty brand Huda Beauty) while short-form-video hosting service Vine’s brief stint from 2013 to 2017 popped out a bevy of entertainers like digital magician Zach King, pop star Shawn Mendes, comedian King Bach, and shock-value YouTubers Logan and Jake Paul.