Lilly Singh: Creator, #GirlLove Advocate, Bawse!
Lilly Singh, also known as iiSuperwomanii, a Toronto native who exploded on YouTube and has staked her claim as one of the most influential names on the Internet. She started on YouTube as a form of therapy to combat her depression. She started to make comedy videos on YouTube to make others laugh, and she definitely accomplished that.
Currently, she has amassed over 11 million subscribers on YouTube, 2.25 million on Twitter, and over 3 million on Facebook. She also has several other accounts for her campaigns and tours. She is a huge presence on YouTube and has made such an impact that she even had her own YouTube campaign including videos and billboards in cities around the world.
Her presence is important because of her pride in her culture and race. Lilly identifies as an Indian-Canadian, and confidently boasts about her background and how proud she is of who she is. She has made jokes about her heritage in videos, but in ways that is relatable to first generation kids with immigrant parents, like myself. Her humble attitude has helped her reach the status she holds on social media, including being recognized as one of the 30 most influential people on the Internet according to TIME.
Lilly has taken her fame and turned it into something that positively interacts her community and some really great causes. She has not forgotten about the fact that the reason she has made it to where she is without her fans. Team Super, which she has dubbed her fans, have supported her nonstop throughout her growth on YouTube and the implementation of several of her social media campaigns. She has created several initiatives that recognizes her fans and shows her appreciation for all they have done for her. She hosts monthly live streams with her fans in order to engage with them on a more personal level by responding to their questions and tweets. She also started her own vlog channel where she can step away from her Superwoman persona and express herself on a different platform. This allows her subscribers to her SuperwomanVlogs channel to see her outside of her scripted sketch videos. She has made her video content available on an almost daily basis, which has made her more visible on a regular basis, despite already posting twice a week on her main channel. One of the more innovative ways she spreads her content is by owning http://newvlogs.com, which redirects to the newest vlog on her channel. In the 8 years I have been on YouTube, I have never experienced someone separating their content away from a youtube.com/ link. Her audience can bookmark this week and can instantly see the newest content from Lilly without having to filter through the saturated subscription boxes.
Another way she was able to reach her audience was through her world tour. Her world tour was inspired by what Lilly calls Unicorn Island. Unicorn Island is Lilly’s ideal happy place and her tour, A Trip to Unicorn Island, is meant to help her audience find happiness amongst the turbulence of life. Her tour visited 27 cities around the world, visiting fans in areas she has never been before. Her tour featured so many different aspects of engaging material that used positive psychology methods to encourage and empower her audience. She was able to visit parts of the world where she hasn’t been able to engage with her audience before like the Philippines, which she documented in her vlogs as she spent her time in other countries and experienced their cultures. Following the success of her first world tour, she turned her tour into a documentary that was shared on YouTube Red for those who had not been able to experience it when she visited their city.
Lilly also works to inspire a Bawse attitude that is meant to encourage others to work hard in order to reach their personal goals and successes. On her website it says:
“This journey has taught me to always pick yourself up, not allow anything to stand in your way and that the only secret to achieving your dreams is hard work.”
She started her Bawse campaign by collaborating with makeup brand Smashbox and created a liquid lipstick, her signature red colour that makes her feel confident. Lilly created this brand identity of being a bawse and exemplifying a resilient, genuine, and bold attitude that she capture brilliantly through the packaging and overall concept of her liquid lipstick. But this brand identity did not stop with just the lipstick. The bawse identity was something she advocated for people to use in all aspects of their life, something that could help them however they may be feeling. This is how her book came to fruition.
Her book, How to be a Bawse: A Guide to Conquering Life, was inspired by the identity that her bawse attitude had formed. Her book covers a lot of her struggles that have led to her success and what learning objectives have come from it that people can implement in their own lives to overcome their own struggles and reach their own goals. Her advice is influential to her audience and helps them understand how her struggle helped her get to where she is now. It is important to understand the journey that led to the goal. She is currently on a book tour to promote her book and provide extra insights on how to be a bawse.
Her success is something that she uses to help others. She is able to create content that positively influences that lives of her audience and they express their gratitude by purchasing her book or movie, or liking and retweeting her videos and tweets. But it doesn’t stop there; Lilly is a strong advocate for several campaigns that influence the lives of others. Lilly has used her presence to help spearhead a campaign with ME to WE that is supported by her social campaign, #GirlLove.
#GirlLove is a campaign that Lilly started to end girl-on-girl hate that is so often seen in society. The social media campaign is to spread positive messages about the women in your life that you admire, that inspire you to do better, and have helped you do so. By thinking about how these women positively impact your life, the competition, jealousy, and hate is eliminated from the conversation. The initial project funds went directly to the Malala Fund, which helps girls around the world go to school. All of the revenue from the video above, which has amassed over 1.6 million views, went directly to this fund. Following the traction of this social campaign, Lilly started a collaboration with ME to WE and #GirlLove to create rafiki bracelets that would be sold and all of the revenue would go towards sending girls in Kenya to school. Lilly set a goal of selling 5000 bracelets and amassed over 32000 bracelets since the campaign started. Lilly then went to Kenya and got to be part of the rafiki creation process and working with women in the community. She was able to hear stories of the women in the community and understand their struggles and reflect them on her own life experiences. She even got to visit one of the schools that WE built there and speak with the girls that are impacted by these types of campaigns. I know that for myself, working with Ryerson ME to WE was an impactful experience because we raised enough money to build a school, but to see exactly where the money is going would be astonishing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKG7GJHszKc
Lilly has made her comedy YouTube channel into a place where people can feel safe, welcome, and accepted. Her personality exudes an energy that is not comparable to anyone I have ever seen in my life. I have been watching Lilly’s videos on YouTube since 2011 and I think a lot of what she does and how she works resonates so heavily for me. Her confidence in overcoming her depression is something that I have worked so hard to implement in my own life to combat my anxiety. She has been a constant source of energy in my YouTube subscription box and I’m adamant I’m not the only one she has positively affected this way. Positive energies like Lilly’s help create a more inclusive space on the Internet and in the world in general, and I am definitely thankful I stumbled upon her videos 6 years ago. This past summer I saw her perform at YouTube FanFest Toronto, and although it was a short amount of time, she definitely made it clear that her success would be nothing without the fans who helped her get there. I think her genuine passion for what she does on social media and how everything she does impacts her audience is why she stands out as such an influential social media personality.
