Curing Your Curiosity: Influencer Edition
Hot Topic among Gen Z is what it takes to become a social media influencer.
Joliet Shuff and Peighton Tubre are two locally famous influencers who shared their experiences on what it is like to be an influencer.
Shuff is an 18-year-old freshman who goes to Southeastern Louisiana University and she is a music influencer. Tubre is a 21-year-old junior at Louisiana State University and is a video/fashion/TikTok influencer. Both influencers go into detail about their media, how COVID has affected them and what they want to achieve through being an influencer.
Joliet Shuff started her music influencing career on YouTube about five years ago and continues to use YouTube as her main platform today.
Shuff makes her own original music, “My genre is a mix of pop ballets and theatre enhanced-Esque Broadway,” Shuff explained.
Being an influencer is a self-made career and for Shuff, going to college has helped her out a lot as a music influencer. She noted, “I’ve been learning how to make music through college and how to incorporate the chord progressions that I’ve learned into my music.”
Shuffs’ most successful video was a collaboration video with Stringstorm; they received over 1 million views. The video is called Adepta Sororitas.
The life of an influencer takes confidence and a positive mentality. Shuff noted that “It takes a lot of motivation and a good bit of understanding in your fanbase and yourself while being able to dig deep and use music as a coping mechanism..”
Although times have changed because of COVID and the world has become more digital, she has been able to focus more on her music because of virtual classes.
Joliet might not know whether these platforms are going to last forever; she also plans to be an influencer through teaching and inspire others to communicate and cope through music.
Peighton Tubre also had some similar experiences. Tubre is a video/fashion/Instagram/TikTok influencer who plans on becoming an actor in the future through her influencing career.
Her journey began in her junior year of high school at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts where she began her career making YouTube videos. The first video she made that struck gold in viewers was a collaboration with YouTuber JAlverez, and that video brought her half a million views.
Right now she doesn’t really do YouTube videos anymore but prefers to use Instagram and TikTok as her main platforms. Currently, in her job as an influencer, she is running a TikTok account for a fantasy sports company called Fan Up.
Being an influencer definitely has its perks. “You do get the cool attention and recognition and you get to meet a lot of famous people and travel to a lot of cool places,” said Peighton. She’s had the honor of collaborating with famous TikTok’er Addison Ray and meeting and hanging out with child singer Mason Ramsey.
2020 was supposed to be the busiest and most awesome year for her as an influencer, but as the world was put to a halt and the classes went online she turned to TikTok as her new platform. Tubre said, “During quarantine, I became more dedicated to TikTok and because of that I acquired more jobs and opportunities.”
Right now she is trending as an influencer and after so many years of experience, she definitely understands the ups and downs of being a content creator. Tubre said “What it takes to be an influencer is to not care what other people think. There will be a lot of haters out there and the best thing to do is to just be confident with yourself and to try not to seek likes for validation.”
In conclusion, these two influencers have been making content for a while now and have become more known for all of their hard work because they hustled and stayed strong and most importantly had fun!
