Duke University in North Carolina has begun offering TikTok lessons to help students advertise their brands.
In Durham, North Carolina, the institution provides a full-credit course called ‘Building Global Audiences,’ which teaches undergraduate students how to improve their social media usage and visibility. Students that took the programme have accumulated 145,000 followers and over 80 million views.
Natalia Hauser, a sophomore in the class, has roughly 12,000 followers on Instagram. Her TikTok account makes anything from $1,000 to $7,000 each month in brand collaborations. Hauser said the training helped her learn how to negotiate with businesses and how much she should charge for her work. She told in a statement:
People don’t seem to realise how wealthy this profession is. It requires a great deal of discussion and commerce. Professor Aaron Dinin, who teaches the TikTok class, has a Ph.D. in English and has worked in the IT industry. The social marketing lecturer had to persuade Duke administration members to offer such a course.
According to Dinin, older generations believe that becoming an influencer is a shallow Gen Z thing. However, these media channels are simply the way the world works. There are several business opportunities and a large geographic reach.
Students in the TikTok class, who collectively have almost 600,000 followers, compare metrics and goals for their accounts and debate why some postings do better than others. Assignments and assignments include creating a similar video utilising a TikTok trend as inspiration and sharing the finished result with classmates.
Students can either film their films during class or spend time reaching out to brands. Some have even found work as a result of their online presence. Because of his expertise in developing a personal brand, one of the students, Ben Chipman, just obtained an internship at LinkedIn in New York. According to Chipman, To acquire a job in places and positions that interest me, I need a social media presence. It’s assumed that I’ll have something to show for myself.
More colleges are recognising the digital age’s trends and offering seminars to assist students develop their own brands. Such institutions strive to remain relevant in an era where a TikTok account is valued more than a degree by some. The Annenberg School at the University of Southern California and the University of Virginia, in addition to Duke University, offer similar courses.