Socy 70 Final Project

The discussion is about how COVID-19 and social media have impacted entrepreneurship and small businesses. The share of self-employed individuals in the US labor force had been decreasing until 2018, but it increased in 2020 due to people leaving their jobs and using platforms like TikTok to start their own businesses. TikTok had a significant increase in downloads in 2020, which encouraged and influenced individuals to create or expand their businesses. People utilized TikTok to promote their businesses using popular sounds and hashtags. This trend spread on social media, generating a lot of insight and reaching a wider audience. The guest, Sean Ray, started his clothing brand during the pandemic and used TikTok to learn about marketing and increase exposure. COVID-19 had both advantages and disadvantages for his business, but he was able to focus and utilize his free time to grow his brand. Having his own clothing brand gives him a sense of freedom and allows him to pursue his own pa How are you doing? I'm Isaac Boston. I'm Dylan LaCroix. And we got a special guest here with us today. So today we're just going to be discussing how COVID-19 and the use of social media impacted entrepreneurship and small businesses. According to the St. Louis Federal Bank Reserve, from January 2004 up until January 2018, we saw a steady decrease in the share of U.S. labor force that is self-employed. In 2018, we actually saw a record low from the past 20 years of around 9.7 percent. Yeah, and in this same graph, they highlight data which shows that self-employment increased 0.4 percentage points from February 2020 to August 2020 alone. It then reached its highest share since 2008 in the summer of 2020. Also in a blog from Hootsuite, which kind of discusses some of the data found through TikTok, the app had its highest number of downloads in 2020, which reached up to almost 850 million. This was 200 million higher than 2019 and 2020, which had 693 million and 94 million downloads in its respective year. People who were leaving their jobs were then using TikTok and other social media platforms to kind of get ideas and start their own business or taking a business that they thought of just a lot more seriously since they had a lot more time on their hands due to COVID. So this is actually where we see the growth of many small businesses including clothing brands, salons, nail techs, barbers, dropshipping, e-commerce, gym trainers, etc. Yeah, this is where we see TikTok and just social media alone encouraging and influencing individuals to create a business or expand on one that they've, you know, previously been thinking of. People have utilized TikTok to promote their business using social media trends such as certain sounds and hashtags. Like a lot of people were using the song Sunny Day by Ted Fresco with hashtags like entrepreneur, self-employed, business tips, and business info. So you see hashtags like these would actually generate a lot of insight. For example, entrepreneur had about 36,715 posts and actually almost had over 476 million views. Another example is entrepreneurship where we see from 3,716 posts with about 32 million views. Small business owner had 14,000 posts with over 133 million views. And business owner, 3,000 posts with almost 18 million views. So just from these numbers alone, you can kind of get a sense of how this sort of ideology was spread on social media. All right, so carrying on from there, I think this would be a good time to introduce our guest and kind of let him say a few things about his business so you can take it from here. Yeah, my name is Sean Ray from Atlanta, Georgia. I have a clothing brand that I started about, well, I had thoughts about it since like 2018, 2019. And I'm really jumping into the business pre-pandemic and like during the pandemic is when I feel like I put my foot on the gas and me and my business partners utilized this time, you know, time out of school and like from work to focus on ourselves and get our own money, especially on since a lot of places and jobs weren't hiring and a lot of things were closed due to COVID. So would you say that COVID was the main reason that you, this business kind of started or would you say the uptick in social media posts, TikTok posts, Instagram posts, people starting their other businesses. Is that what kind of inspired you to to keep going and to push for your business? Or did you kind of, were you guys the pioneers or did you guys? I would say it didn't, TikTok didn't, isn't the reason I started, but it definitely is a reason that I even kept pursuing it and kept going harder. So I saw all the potential that my brand had inside of Atlanta and the TikTok fans and Instagram people that were seeing my brand also saw our potential. So for me, I just put my mind into it and saw this inspiration that I could possibly be the next big brand, next bigger brand. And um, seeing like younger people like me also like go viral and blow up off of dances and songs and little trendy things. I figured that, why not me? Alright, so going from there, I guess it would be a good question to ask. In what ways did you utilize TikTok, if any, to expand your business and reach a wider audience? Well, TikTok for one, I didn't know when I first got on, but you can learn a lot of things about just clothing and brands and marketing itself with like TikTokers who primarily focus on like showing you the tricks and trades of TikTok. TikTok also has like the ability to get your exposure up. So if you have friends that like share and repost your things, then their friends will be able to see it. And also like TikTok's algorithms allow people to be on like the same timeline in a sense, where like if you saw, if you're a fan of like a comedian, say Drewski, then you'll most likely see a lot of funny things on your timeline. So for a person like me who saw a lot of clothing, I would see like a lot of clothing on my timeline and like vice versa for like my customers. If they saw like other upcoming streetwear brands, they would see mine as well. I would just try to kind of do the same, implement these same things like uh, V-Lone, Off-White, like the premier streetwear brands. I would try to not imitate, but you know, try to do some of the same things they're doing. So did COVID kind of stop you guys from doing certain things and helping your brand grow or did COVID kind of boost this because you had so much more time on your hands? It was a little bit of both because like COVID restrictions still were like daunting, you know, in America. Well, and like especially especially like when it first happened, like people were taking it very seriously. So like people were in like a frenzy, a panic, and then once people started realizing that it was like not, I wouldn't say not as serious, but the world just couldn't handle it better. So like earlier I would have like manufacturing issues, like my like my manufacturers in China and Asia, they would like have factories shut down due to like COVID-19. So that kind of like slowed me down, but I was still was focused, super focused, mainly because I had nothing else to do. I had a whole lot of free time. So like my day just revolved around trying to get a sale, trying to get more followers on Instagram, and just trying to get my brand out there. So, um, history has shown that there's been a lot of, let's say, disadvantages to black people in the workforce. You're a young man. You're a young man. You're a young man. You don't have a lot of experience. You're a young black male. You're at an Ivy League school. What would you say the advantage of having your own clothing brand, instead of working for somebody else, working for somebody else's clothing brand? What does this do for you? Because I see a lot of times, like I saw a post someone was saying, it's a lot harder to make 200,000 owning your own business alone, and it's a lot easier to make 200,000 when you're working for somebody else, let's just say. So what do you, what's your take on that? I just feel like for everybody, their path's different in a sense. But for me, I use my paychecks to like start my brand until I got to the point where it's like, I'm not to be, I'm not about to be telling people when I'm getting up, or like dictating what time I have to go in and what time I have to eat lunch. So it's more like a freedom aspect. Yeah, um, also like, everybody doesn't have like the means and the resources to just start a brand. It does take a lot of time, money, and like effort in a sense. So I feel like a job, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say it's the worst thing, but it definitely can be a hindrance, especially when you're trying to make your brand like one of them, one of those type brands. You can't be at work every day. So like, yeah. Oh yeah, we really appreciate Vishal Ray for stopping by and just giving us insight into his business, Facebook Boy Atlanta. It's been very, very successful. We're really excited for him. So yeah, this really just illustrates how effective TikTok and social media has been in promoting businesses and their ideas and their products. Success in this fashion has a major impact on the labor market as a whole because now we see more people leaving their jobs and actually taking a risk and starting their business that they've always dreamed of. Yeah, so this in essence has revolutionized the workforce for many people, causing them to move away from the eight hour workday that we once fought for in the eight hour day movement and into the realm of self-employment. Yeah, so exactly. Through the spread of other success stories and the growth of personal businesses, this is where we saw TikTok and other platforms effectively influencing people to do the same. We believe this is why we see such an exponential increase in the share of self-employment in the United States labor force following COVID-19.