What it’s like to come out at work as a social-media influencer

“That’s the TikTok boy!" she exclaimed.

Brown gulped. For weeks, he’d been posting comic videos online about generational differences at work. Several went viral. He’d tried to keep his budding life on social media separate from his more button-down professional identity, but the two worlds were colliding.

“I was like, ‘Shoot, now they’re going to start asking questions,’ " Brown, 25, says. Six months later, he quit to pursue content creation full time.

No one expects to share a cubicle with an influencer. These days, though, a growing number of Americans are pursuing side hustles on social media, even as they work traditional jobs. Some become accidental stars after posting a video that unexpectedly strikes a chord. Others amass online followers for months or years before co-workers find out—moments that can prompt everything from pride to relief to embarrassment.

“It’s like being Hannah Montana," says Brooke Miccio, 27, referring to the Disney show featuring a teenager who secretly transformed into a pop star at night.

A New York-based influencer, Miccio boasts half a million social media followers riveted by what she eats, buys and wears, which has yielded a steady flow of brand deals. Before becoming a full-time influencer, she worked as a sales rep at Oracle, cold-calling prospective leads and getting cursed at or hung up on. She spent her breaks and nights building her follower count with up-close looks at her life as a recent college graduate, earning $10,000 a month on YouTube alone because of all the clicks by the time she quit.

The juxtaposition of the two roles made for surreal moments. Once, Miccio recalls walking in on several superiors whom she’d never met watching one of her videos.

“Oh God, I want to crawl into a hole right now," she recalls thinking as they turned to stare. “I was like, ‘Nice to meet you.’ "

There are 50 million content creators globally who earn money by posting online, according to Goldman Sachs, and 4% of them earn more than $100,000 a year from their work. Those slim odds haven’t diminished the profession’s allure: A recent Morning Consult poll found 57% of Gen Z respondents said they’d become an influencer if given the chance. Colleges including the University of Texas at San Antonio now offer bachelor’s degrees aimed at aspiring influencers.

Some don’t reveal their online stardom until they quit. After having a son in 2020, sports marketer Harrison Schenck, 37, began sharing anonymous musings about fatherhood on Twitter. 

No one except his wife and parents knew about the account until two years later, when he quit his job as vice president of operations and outed himself to his boss. By then, he had an audience of 400,000 followers, a portion of whom were dads who also wanted to become entrepreneurs. They paid him for social media coaching, earning him around $25,000 a month.

Schenck says the anonymity helped fuel his account’s success, allowing him to feel freer in his writing. (At the time, he refrained from putting his name on the account and used a photo of Andy Griffith as his avatar.) Still, getting to pull up his Twitter account on his boss’s computer screen for the first time was a rush.

“I’ve never climbed Mount Everest, but I imagine it’s like when you get to the top and finally look out," Schenck says, adding that his boss was supportive of his new venture.

Los Angeles-based Joanne Molinaro, 45, was a partner at the prestigious law firm Foley & Lardner when she started posting on TikTok about vegan Korean cooking. Though her videos took off, drawing hundreds of thousands of followers, it wasn’t until her account was name-checked in a TikTok commercial during the World Series that her online celebrity became widely known at her firm.

“We’re lawyers," she says. “We’re so busy, focused on surviving, we don’t have time to be on social media."

Influencers say it’s often interns who recognize them, given that they tend to be more social-media-savvy. In other settings, it’s customers who point or stare.

In Toronto, patients regularly recognize TikToker and physiotherapist Nathaniel James, 27, even in scrubs. Four years ago, James was working at a liquor store and going to school, and had no TikTok account. Then a friend with just 10 followers posted a goofy video of them dancing and it blew up, drawing a million views overnight. 

He and his friends have continued making videos, earning him a six-figure income, mostly from brand deals, which involve promoting everything from fast food to movies.

James says his TikTok fame is good small-talk fodder, which comes in handy during 45-minute physical therapy sessions. He says he loves the job and has no plans to quit.

For others, juggling two identities proves too much to balance. Last summer, Andrew Prayogo, 31, a business-operations manager at a tech startup, began posting fashion tips under the name Andrew Polo on TikTok, a platform he’d chosen partly because he didn’t know many people on it. Especially in the hoodie-dominant tech world, he didn’t want to feel self-conscious about his sartorial pursuits.

His layperson-friendly videos on color combos and silhouettes started going viral, and co-workers scrolling TikTok began encountering him in their feeds. Once, while Prayogo was using the bathroom, the startup’s co-founder suddenly quoted one of his videos to him from an adjacent stall, adding that per Prayogo’s advice, he intended to try wearing a combination of blue and green.

Prayogo was taken aback, but laughed: “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, go do that.’"

In June, Prayogo left his job to pursue full-time content creation online, where he has 450,000 followers. “It’s taken on a life of its own," he says.