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Starting a social media business and leaving their day job is a dream for many people. Actually achieving this is a genuine measure of success, especially given Aussie content creators have no access to revenue sources such as the TikTok creator fund.
Against this backdrop, social media success stories say it’s essential to establish long-term revenue streams such as 12-month contracts with brand partners before leaving a stable job.
Professional make-up artist, Ellen Malone, is a full time content creator on TikTok with more than 500,000 followers on this platform alone. She turned the challenges of the early years of the pandemic into a successful social media business.
When Malone started working on her social media presence, she was working as a TV presenter for The Shopping Network and also ran a beauty business. COVID put a stop to both. She took a job as a content creator for a beauty business but pretty quickly realised she wanted to do the same thing for herself.
“That first year, I was nervous to do it my way and use my voice authentically,” she says.
Malone’s specialty is an advanced, professional make-up application technique called under painting. Her first post on this topic went viral, to her surprise.
“I didn’t think people would be interested, because it’s fiddly and complicated to teach. I made a video where I took off half my makeup and I redid it the way I do as a professional artist and the video took off,” says Malone.
“It was such an eye opener and, even though my series was intended to acknowledge and honour make-up artists, I learned you’re better off making content about what you excel in. I’m all about making the skin look just as beautiful in real life as it does on camera.”
Malone’s channel took off from there. “It was all about finding my voice and allowing myself to do things I like and not worrying about trying to do it like everybody else.”
Her first paid video opened her eyes to the prospect of attracting work through her posts. At first, clients balked at the technical nature of her posts, but she stood her ground.
“I got push back, but I really believed in my videos and felt it was the right approach for my channel. I was also really new to paid work and didn’t understand some of the etiquette about approvals for posting. [When I posted my first paid post], I got a panicked call from the client asking to take it down. But it sold out the blush it promoted. Then, the company offered me a contract and that was the gateway to full-time work,” she says.
Malone’s advice is to work with brands that are a good fit. “I turned down 90 per cent of brand deals for the first two years because I wasn’t being offered opportunities I really liked. The big shift for me was once my channel was attracting really great brands. Then I could pick and choose a bit more. I didn’t leave the day job until I had some long term partnerships; not just one deal, but 12-month arrangements.”
Today, Malone is recognised almost every time she leaves home. “I don’t mind, I take it as compliment. I’m extremely grateful to do what I do for a living.”
Aside from her TikTok account, Malone also has an Instagram profile, which is a different beast to TikTok.
“Instagram works on referral. The algorithm doesn’t feed your content to people who would like it as accurately as other social media. But on Instagram, people tend to send accounts to each other,” she says.
She also has a YouTube channel, which she doesn’t use as much as her other social media pages.
“I have to film completely different content for YouTube. One of the challenges as a content creator is having the time to film and edit completely different content for each channel. I think I will push further into YouTube at some point, where videos tend to be longer format and with higher production values.”
As for the future, there is potential for Malone to build a brand of her own down the track.
“I’ll still be a working artist, but I choose to work because I love my clients,” she says.
<subhead> Real life stories matter
Natalie Battaglia, founder of recipe site The Mindful Mocktail, established her business using social media in 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic, as part of a commitment to move away from drinking alcohol every day.
“Everyone was amping up their drinking and, although we were going to be home for months, I didn’t want to drink my way through it. I was looking for something to replace my evening wine and non-alcoholic options available in supermarkets didn’t appeal. They were filled with sugar and artificial sweeteners and other nasties and they were expensive. So I decided to channel my energy into creating a recipe blog,” says Battaglia.
“My background is in search engine optimisation and, although at first I wanted to start a website, I realised very quickly it’s a very slow burn getting people to a site. I realised social media was going to be a much quicker way to get in front of an audience, so I started sharing the recipes through those channels.”
Battalia soon learned while people initially followed her social media profiles for the recipes, they stayed for the personal connection to her.
“It’s not just about pretty drinks, they wanted to hear more about my story. So, I would post recipes but always include a titbit on why I wasn’t drinking as much and how it was impacting my family. That’s where all the engagement came from,” she says.
Today, Battaglia has amassed 428,000 followers on Instagram and 125,000 followers on TikTok. The Mindful Mocktail web site gets about two million visitors a year through traffic driven from Instagram.
When Battaglia started her social media journey with The Mindful Mocktail, she was managing online marketing for her family’s shelving business. This gave her a degree of flexibility when trying to juggle both obligations, as well as raise two boys.
She knew The Mindful Mocktail had promise when her Instagram account reached 5000 followers and brands started contacting her about creating recipes for their social media pages and promoting their product.
Battaglia’s advice to other people considering leaving paid employment to focus on social media full time is to do so with caution.
“Think twice about quitting a full-time job unless you are extremely confident in your ability to run your site as a business. Social media algorithms can be very tricky. I was lucky because I was able to work part-time and now I’m down to just one day a week at the shop and I spend five days a week on The Mindful Mocktail,” she says.
Battalia warns people against thinking social media is an easy way to make a living. “Social media is a lot of work. It’s all about building the audience and making sure they trust you.”
She stresses technical prowess is also a must.
“Lighting is everything when you’re creating quality content. You also need to get really specific about who is watching you and getting the most out of your content. You need to constantly ask them what they want to see next, it’s not about what you like.
“I used to wonder why a post I thought would go viral didn’t do well. But I’d ask the audience and they would tell me the recipe was too hard or an ingredient was hard to get. It’s about creating content that’s aesthetically pleasing, but also really easy for the user to create the recipe at home.”
She says trolls are a factor of life when you run a social media business and she’s become used to the personal nature of the comments she receives.
“People would get very angry about being told that maybe they shouldn’t drink so much. In the beginning it used to really upset me. Now, it’s water off a duck’s back. Ninety per cent of people are fantastic.”
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