Of an estimated 50 million content creators worldwide, three Charlotteans are showing how they can make a living out of a passion for food, travel, events and small businesses.
It all started around the time of the pandemic.
Andrew Colacchio, Andrea Fox and Jensen Savannah Nichol love food, and they began by creating restaurant reviews for friends and posting them on their social media accounts. After several months, when they picked up followers, they realized they could move from a side hustle to a career. Like most creators, they learned that it includes being paid for posts, teaching people how to manage social media, and creating content for other businesses.
“What I’ve really been able to do with my audience is kind of romanticize where we live and make people feel like a tourist in their own city or in their own state,” Nichol said recently. “And they realize that they don’t have to go too far to realize that there is so much to see.”
Nichol describes herself as a social media influencer who consumes a lot of social media herself. Her @jensensavannah Instagram account has 264,000 followers and her TikTok account — with the same name — has 405,000. She produces content that she would like to see on trends, food, events, and travel.
Growing up in Charlotte as a kid, her father regularly scheduled weekend adventures, and she grew up realizing that there was fun stuff to do nearby. He also taught her about what it’s like to run a small business, and that’s her primary client focus now.
“A lot of the businesses that I go to, they’re great, but people don’t know some of these really important stories behind them, of what makes them feel so special,” she said. “So I really love being able to dive a little bit deeper and really having these people feel connected.”
A Charlotte-based agent for social media influencers
The market is growing fast enough to have produced a Charlotte-based agent for social media influencers, Jorge Millares, who is also Nichol’s fiance. Millares was a panelist on influencer marketing at two recent media industry workshops hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Millares cited April 2023 research by Goldman Sachs, estimating potential growth in the market for content creators from $250 billion today to $470 billion by 2027. The firm’s report estimates 10-20% annual growth in the roughly 50 million global creators worldwide, 4% of whom — now about 2 million — earn more than $100,000 per year.
Locally, Millares pointed to data from Ted Williams, who created both CharlotteFive, the arts, food and culture section of The Charlotte Observer, and the Charlotte Agenda (now Axios Charlotte). Williams is now entrepreneur in residence at Queens University of Charlotte and was a leader in the UNC Chapel Hill events.
Williams’ research suggests that 93% of ad buyers in North Carolina intend to increase or maintain their investment in influencer marketing in 2024. Millares said 43% intend to increase that investment.
Millares described a partnership between Nichol and a glamping (glamorous camping) site in western North Carolina. Before her post, the site’s Instagram account had 2,000 followers. Two weeks after her post, their account had more than 25,000, increasing bookings and revenue.
Engagement rate, or how much an audience responds to a content creator’s posts, is a key metric, Millares said. The pay range for an influencer with 300,000 to 400,000 followers and an engagement rate of 2-4% varies, he said, depending on campaign size and the volume of posts. A single Instagram or TikTok video might cost between $2,000 and $3,000 each.
‘It’s the new TV’
Nichol said she explores businesses and events on her own and still creates posts for fun. In other cases, businesses or brands contact her for collaborations on social media to reach her followers. If it’s a dream brand, like Bojangles or Cheerwine, she said it’s a no-brainer. With others, she vets them carefully to ensure she maintains trust with her followers.
A common challenge for influencers, she said, is small businesses that offer a free appetizer in exchange for shooting and editing a 30-second video that might require eight hours of work. On the other hand, other small businesses understand the value.
“I do think that it’s undervalued,” Nichol said. “There’s a restaurant in Wilmington that I posted about called Indochine, and it got probably like 300,000 likes and millions of views. The next day I see a video on Instagram and there’s like a line going past the street for them, waiting to open. And I was like, OK, I guess this is the new TV.”
Eye rolls from his parents
In his day job, Andrew Colacchio manages social media for Charlotte businesses. But he’s turned a background in cooking and restaurant marketing into creating restaurant reviews for social media. His Instagram account — @andrewloves_ — has 64,000 followers, and his TikTok account has about 16,000.
Colacchio receives 15 messages a day from people asking how to become a successful content creator. He tells them that it takes luck, hustle and resonating with your audience. It doesn’t happen overnight, he says, and to make really good money, creators need hundreds of thousands of followers.
Like Nichol, Colacchio enjoys working with small, family-run businesses. When their owners have kids in a younger generation who are into social media, they’re more likely to be receptive to paying a content creator. Most of his collaborations with small restaurants, he said, make a significant impact on their business.
Colacchio has been out to dinner with his parents when people come up and say, ‘Oh my god, are you Andrew?’ And my parents just roll their eyes,” he said. “But that always feels good.”
Colacchio estimates that his Instagram video on Jon G’s Barbecue in Peachland, North Carolina, has almost 800,000 views. Comments below Colacchio’s post attack him for supporting Texas-style barbecue, but he describes Jon G’s as nothing short of spectacular.
Coaching, brand deals and content creation
Andrea Fox moved to Charlotte from Austin, Texas, in 2022. She has 79,000 followers on her Instagram account, @dailydreclt, and 9,000 followers on TikTok, @thecltea. Fox says her business is based on several components: coaching clients, teaching courses, brand deals nd creating content for other businesses. Showing return is critical.
“I've made case studies with my clients,” she said. “Recently, I worked with a spa, and they grew 3,000 followers from my post alone in one week. And that is a significant amount of business that they are going to get from all of those people that will result in thousands and thousands of dollars for them. I remind myself that they're a small business and I am too. We are both in this together to help each other out.”
Fox said Charlotte is moving up in the world of social media influencers.
“Austin was a lot, I don't want to say more serious with content creation. But there were a lot more full-time creators,” she said. “And I think in some ways that created more competition. But Austin is a city that has a lot of great festivals and interesting community things that happen.
“So you have a lot of big brands, big activations, Nike coming in to do this, that, and the other thing. So the creators there are able to say, ‘Hey Nike, it's 15 grand, you know, to have me at this thing.’ Charlotte doesn't really have that level yet. I think it could. It just doesn't right now.”
A Charlottean in Los Angeles
Before moving to Los Angeles to cover popular culture for Axios, Max Millington managed social media as a student at Queens University of Charlotte and later reported for Axios Charlotte. He recently saw the national impact of a social media post on both a media organization and a small local business.
While covering the Golden Globes ceremony for Axios, Millington was shooting video with Ayo Edebiri, an actress from “The Bear” television series. He asked Edebiri what she had learned about Chicago, where it was filmed. She told Millington about Oooh Wee It Is, a restaurant that she liked.
“So I sent Axios Chicago the video and they posted it on their social media,” Millington said. “Mind you, Axios Chicago is not Axios Charlotte. Axios Charlotte’s been around for years. They have 300,000 followers — they’re doing great. Axios Chicago just launched a couple of months ago, and at the time, they had 1,300 followers on their account. So they posted video of her talking about the Chicago food scene, and the video blows up. I’m talking hundreds of thousands of views. It’s the most viewed video the account has ever had. Other local Chicago outlets picked it up and reposted it. The reposts got hundreds of thousands of views, and Fox and "Good Morning America" covered it.
“It created a lot of exposure for the restaurant, which was a small Black-owned restaurant,” Millington said. “So I was really proud of that, because it was great content and it did really well on social media. But I also inadvertently helped a small business in Chicago.”
Catherine Thompson, Karsyn Sadler and Finian Curran are students in the Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte, which provides the news service in support of local community news.