Better known as the SplashTwinz, first-year Mercer students Trechelle and Treona Andino, who play on the basketball team, went viral on TikTok in their freshman year of high school five years ago for mocking a trending dance. Since then, they’ve accumulated 10.4 million followers on the popular social media platform, for hopping on dance trends and posting content every day.
“We started taking it to the next level when it was Musical.ly,” Treona said. “The headquarters came across our stuff, and they reached out to us, and they put us in this group with a whole bunch of influencers.”
The company challenged them to gain one hundred thousand more followers within a month, and they did. In doing so, TikTok flew them out to Los Angeles, California to visit the headquarters amongst other West Coast sights.
As the SplashTwinz have maintained their platform, they’ve seen their fair share of brand deals with companies like Nike, Coca Cola, Overtime, and Boohoo. In the spirit of continuing their influencer careers, these TikTok famous twins are business majors at Mercer. Though they aren’t sure yet whether they will complete their associates degree and move on to a four-year college. They say they are keeping their options open.
The twins’ path to TikTok fame follows a pattern that is not a pattern. There is an element of randomness to how people become famous.
Sammy O’Donnell landed in the spotlight by accident, going viral for belting the high notes of the song “Into the Unknown” from the movie Frozen 2, in a bathroom with lots of reverb, on her way to work.
Influencer Emily Robinson of Ocean County, New Jersey, also known as Emily Riboflavin, gears her content toward fashion and makeup, specializing in cottage core, nature-inspired costumes.
Her mushroom character with a unique pillow-like hat and colorful dress reached an audience: 6.1 million views, and got 1.7 million likes. This year for Halloween, she created eight different looks including a highly popular zombified fairy.
Meg Levine, a social media influencer and model who goes by meglevv on TikTok, calls her journey to TikTok fame a soft launch, as she slowly went more and more viral. What pushed her into the spotlight was a series where she would sing through all of the female roles of a musical in one minute and one take. She now has 637,000 followers.
Levine says that while luck is a factor in achieving TikTok fame there are things that help.
“I would say the ingredients of a viral video are luck, pacing–short to the point videos are more likely to gain traction–and entertainment factor. Are people going to sit there and rewatch your video? Because watch time allegedly has a lot to do with how much your video is pushed out. From that point, it’s just, does the algorithm smile upon you and push your video out?” Levine says.
The algorithm is a major factor that is the engine propelling content creators to fame on TikTok. It is the company’s internal recommendation system that puts posts in each viewer’s “For You” section. The program is supposed to promote content viewers will like based on their previous behavior, but it has major drawbacks according to content creators.
“The algorithm exploits young women more than young women exploit themselves,” Levine says.
She explains how the algorithm has exploited her when she’s gone live in a low cut top.
“I have creepy, creepy men from all over the world telling me to stand up, turn around, do a dance, take my shirt off, and I’m like, wrong app, wrong place,” Levine said.
O’Donnell agrees but thinks it’s a given in some sense, “I feel like social media always does that, why wouldn’t TikTok? The algorithm loves to flaunt women and their bodies.”
All of these creators come to a couple similar conclusions; first, as unpredictable as the algorithm can be, consistency is an important part to maintaining a platform.
She is now the self-proclaimed ex-CEO of bathroom singing. Since she is not as active on TikTok anymore, her engagement has decreased; her videos which used to see 40-100k views on average now receive around 10,000.
Robinson, who currently posts about every other day on TikTok, says she is frustrated because she can’t count on the algorithm to do its job, despite doing hers.
“This is my fucking job. It sucks that I have to leave it up to an unpredictable algorithm to kind of define where my wellbeing stands at the moment,” she says.
She says that the algorithm can sometimes backfire and randomly remove content based on Community Guidelines.
“I’ve gotten stuff taken down that’s less revealing than the stuff that’s more revealing, even if the views are the same,” Robinson says. She adds, “I’ve gotten stuff taken down that says I’m impersonating somebody. I don’t get it.”
What’s more concerning to her though, is her SFX makeup videos being removed.
Overall, however, a key upside of being TikTok famous is that when things are working, the influencers stand to make money from endorsement deals.
Because of her platform, Robinson was able to launch a clothing line and attained partnerships with multiple companies like MAC Cosmetics.
For the Splash Twinz, Levine, O’Donnell, and Robinson, TikTok has provided an opportunity to build and maintain a platform and create an actual career out of their work. However, it has also exposed the social media site’s weaker points: its algorithm, how it relates to sexuality, and the seemingly random application of community guidelines.
