This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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TikTok has nearly 100 million monthly active users in the United States alone. It is a crazy phenomenon. I'm actually not one of those monthly active users myself, although I do enjoy watching some TikTok videos. I just don't really post there. And that's partly because unlike a lot of other social media platforms, TikTok skews to a much younger crowd with the vast majority of its user base under 25 years old.
Sometimes it seems even much younger than that. But as I said, it's definitely a phenomenon for sure. So when a teacher, this is our story today, by the way, when a teacher looks for a way to connect with her students during lockdown, she starts her own TikTok account and goes to the head of the class with viral videos. Now she now has more than a million followers, actually 1.5 million and counting. And she is TikTok famous, which is a real thing, by the way.
I'm not actually being sarcastic, TikTok famous is a real thing. Some TikTok celebrities become actual celebrities, but how does this attention translate to money? Now that is one of the fascinating parts of TikTok for this Generation Xer here, because it is a little bit different from so many other social networks in terms of, oh, if I get a million followers, how do I then monetize that? That's what we'll look at in this story. Social Studies teacher gains 1.5 million TikTok followers, I should say 1.5 million and counting.
Well, that story is coming up in just 30 seconds after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Rebecca Rogers is a Social Studies teacher who witnessed firsthand the mental health impacts that COVID lockdown had on students. When schools closed in March, 2020, she saw a slow deterioration of their wellbeing. As the months went by, she became desperate to find ways to better connect with them. But it wasn't until late October that she decided to do something about it.
What was that? It was to meet them where they were already hanging out. That's right, it was time to sign up for TikTok. Rebecca made an account on the wildly popular social platform with a plan to make a fool of herself for her students' enjoyment. Those are her words.
Her logic was simple. If they could see her acting ridiculously, they might get a little extra cheer for a day in what was becoming an increasingly tough year. And she felt she could do that with a few silly videos. The idea came from a colleague who had already chalked up 400,000 followers. Together, they made Rebecca's first video.
And since TikTok was famous for dances, that's where they started. To find a popular song, Rebecca spent time studying up on TikTok's For You page. This is a little bit like a dashboard for users of the app. There, you're inundated with recommended videos and crucially for Rebecca, you can see what's most popular. She watched to get an idea of what was trending with the assumption that she could piggyback off those themes to create her first dance video.
Within days of posting it, Rebecca had passed the test. She earned a thousand followers. She knew a lot of that was driven by her own students as well as family and friends. The kids at her school thought she was famous, but neither they nor Rebecca had any idea what was to come. For the first few weeks, Rebecca committed to posting three fun dancing videos per week.
Her account quickly grew to over 10,000 followers and she started to feel like she might be onto something. Could her TikTok efforts turn into something more than a fun distraction for her students? As an added benefit, the 10,000 follower mark also lets users sign up to the Creator Fund. This is TikTok's way of sharing revenue with successful users. It was around this time that the wider TikTok teacher community also opened up to her.
One teacher in particular, known as Mrs. Bench, was incredibly helpful in giving Rebecca advice on how to grow her following and maybe, just maybe turn the traction she'd already had into a real revenue generating project. It was time to get an education. Now the first thing Mrs. Bench advised was to pick up the pace.
In other words, increase your output. TikTokers who post every day are rewarded with more views by the algorithm. Second, Mrs. Bench told her that a series of videos works well on TikTok. Rather than one-off single videos about different topics and dances, Rebecca created a series titled "Things Set in Classrooms." According to Mrs. Bench, users are more likely to subscribe
if they know there's more similar content coming. As the months went by and her views and subscriber count grew, Rebecca premiered another series called "I Don't Get Paid Enough" about funny classroom stories. The final tip Mrs. Bench gave Rebecca was to have fun, make videos you'd want to watch and put your heart into it. TikTok's algorithm is so advanced, it can almost sense if something has been made with love or just thrown together.
In Rebecca's experience, the videos made with true passion always perform better. Now these tips from a successful TikTok teacher worked wonders and Rebecca went to the head of the class. By posting every day, targeting popular trends and releasing videos in a series, the TikTok algorithm rewarded her and viewership skyrocketed along with subscribers. Soon, Rebecca was reaching hundreds of thousands of people with every post, sometimes millions. With that success, she was able to make some real money from her videos via the Creator Fund.
While the payment is usually only a few cents per hundred views, that can add up when you have viral videos. And in some cases, Rebecca makes hundreds of dollars per video. She's now consistently bringing in at least $2,000 a month. Beyond that, Rebecca has been offered sponsorship deals of which she is very selective about what she accepts and has been approached to be in a fan fiction film as well as another film about TikTok teachers. It's been quite the adventure in less than six months of being a creator.
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So I look at this kind of thing and I'm like, "Wow, this is just amazing in so many different ways." And again, you know, I have my own perspective of being from Generation X and also just my perspective of being a creator for a long time, but working on different platforms. And so every platform that comes along has advantages and disadvantages and in some ways they advance the narrative, they advance the opportunities for individuals, but of course they're always winners and losers and that comes with a cost as well and such. So I think if I'm gonna kind of distill my analysis here, I would say the economics of this are fascinating because if you had, you know, 1.5 million followers on any other network, you would probably be making a lot more than $2,000 a month. So in some ways, it's really quite limiting that somebody can be so famous or so popular, let's say on this network, but yet, you know, only a small amount of money is coming through at least via this creator fund, okay? Now, you know, having said that, the real opportunity has nothing to do with the creator fund.
The real opportunity is, you know, what do you do with that newfound fame, okay? So something that Rebecca said to us, she said, you know, the sponsorships that I won't take on TikTok because she's very selective there, she will sometimes offer, you know, to do a post for them on Instagram. Because her audience on Instagram is much older, they understand how sponsorships work. So she's more willing to do that there. So she is smart in thinking, how can I transfer, you know, this celebrity status to ways that might be more monetizable?
So, you know, you never know what's gonna happen, right? That's why I encourage you to experiment. What is your next experiment? Whatever it is that you're involved with if you're a teacher or something totally different. Rebecca also said, our last comment here, she said, it looks like a lot of fun and it is, but it's also a lot of work.
So if you want to make money off of content, you have to find content people want to watch, which I think is so key. So Rebecca, congratulations, good work. I'm gonna go subscribe to your TikTok, even though I'm not super on TikTok myself. But, you know, if I am, you're gonna be my inspiration. And listeners, speaking of inspiration, you know what I always say in these stories, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
As I said, what is your next experiment? Today's show notes, including links to Rebecca's TikTok, anything else I mentioned in this episode will be at sidehustleschool.com/1641. Thank you so much for tuning in. Listeners, I hope you'll come back tomorrow. Subscribe, follow, go do something for yourself as well.
My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
