Most teenage kids have social media websites they use daily for personal reasons. TaeVheon Alcorn and his twin brother SaeVheon have accounts too, but they also have accounts where they promote companies and celebrities as a part time job. Because they have a vast amount of followers on their business accounts and they are paid to promote companies they obtain the job title as a Social Media influencer.
The twins currently run four accounts: three Instagram and one Snapchat. They use the followers to create new accounts, monetize, and network to work with other social media influencers. They have reached a total of 1.2 million people across all of their accounts. 250K Instagram, 880K Vine and 83K on Snapchat.
“This all started when I was 12 years old and I saw my friends getting a lot of likes,” T. Alcorn said. “I wanted to get a lot of likes just like they were so I started to follow a bunch of people on the app Vine.”
Vine was their first breakthrough. They followed a lot of accounts and got followers in return, eventually they were receiving more followers than they were following. T. Alcorn on his Vine sports page, and S. Alcorn on his pages of celebrities. After running the sports page for a year, they changed it to a comedy page and had several posts go viral.
After gaining thousands of followers on Vine, they began using Snapchat and Instagram too. Both sites are about Dylan O’Brien; an actor from Teen Wolf and The Maze Runner. They typically post pictures of him acting on set or photos that the paparazzi has taken. On average their posts range from 11,000-23,000 likes each on Instagram and about 75,000-82,000 views on Snapchat.
“These fan pages do so much for us, they allow TaeVheon and I to connect with popular clothing brands, communicate with famous Internet people, and interact with other people like us who have millions of followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and of course it allows us to make a profit,” S. Alcorn said.
In addition, the twins create publicity for O’Brien by sell products with his name and or picture on it. To get people to buy the products they post pictures of their own clothes on their pages. Every now and then they have sales so that it will boost the amount of products purchased.
“[We] sell hoodies, short sleeve tees, long sleeve tees, tank tops, sweatshirts, and even mugs,” T. Alcorn said.
They also promote other upcoming sites such as clothing brands. They post pictures and videos of the clothes across of all of their social media sites so that it reaches a larger audience. The companies pay the twins for each post and they often receive free products from the companies.
“Some sites we’ve promoted are Shelly Cove, Badoo, and Wood Watches,” S. Alcorn said.
Across all of their accounts, they are required to post certain advertisements and promotions on specific days when the company asks. They continue to post normal content on other days. On average, they post one thing every other day to keep their followers intrigued and gain new ones.
The Wood Watches company, for example, pay the twins $185-$200 for promoting their products. On Snapchat they can make anywhere from $20-$125 per post.
By doing this the boys have made a total of $15,000-$20,000. With this money the boys are going to save up and eventually buy their own cars, they are hoping to do this in early 2017. They have been saving most of their money since they started in the 5th grade.