TikTok goes beyond the dance and becomes a professional showcase

Surfing the TikTok boom in recent years, professionals from various fields are producing content on the platform to promote their image and increase income.

Lawyers, doctors and teachers are some of the examples of workers who use the video platform to boost their careers. Moving away from the popular dances of the application, they seek to show in a relaxed way that they have knowledge about their areas, gaining followers, becoming a reference for the public and, thus, conquering customers.

This was the case of Fayda Belo, a criminal lawyer focused on the defense of minorities who started recording videos for TikTok in March 2021. Through the social network, she began to explain concepts from the legal world and to unravel cases of racism, homophobia and machismo that gained projection on the internet.

Today, less than a year later, Fayda has more than 1 million followers on the network and has seen customer demand triple in her office.

“It was a turning point that I cannot explain. When my first video went viral, I realized that I could use the legal knowledge I have to explain to people their rights in a simple, easy and cheerful language. When we talk about Law, we always think in something plastered, robust, that no one understands anything. I did the opposite: I took the law and took it in a way that everyone understands”, says Fayda.

The lawyer attributes her success precisely to the focus on her area of ​​expertise. Her office only seeks to handle cases involving underrepresented groups, such as women, people of color, and the LGBTQIA+ community, in line with her content on TikTok. With the videos, she shows her legal knowledge.

“There is no reason for us to create a card with a number and the caption ‘call me’. What the client wants to see is that you have the technical knowledge on the subject, because when he goes in search of a lawyer, he will look for what you really understand. Shooting videos on these topics made the public see that I have this knowledge.”

Psychiatrist Maria Clara Silveira also surfed the popularization of the network to boost her services. In 2020, she started producing content for Instagram, with the aim of projecting herself in the job market, but when she noticed the growth of TikTok, she realized that the network could be a greater opportunity.

So, in mid-2021, it started migrating its psychiatry content to the platform, but unknowingly restricted the comments on the posts and saw that the videos didn’t go very far. After correcting the flaw, making room for interaction with his videos, he started to grow quickly and today he already has more than 120 thousand followers and posts with more than 1 million views.

“After that, it grew very fast. I had been working on Instagram for over a year, and it’s not that it didn’t help, but what makes a big difference in my schedule is TikTok. When I opened the comments there, in the month The next day I had a full schedule”, says Maria Clara, who estimates that 40% of her appointments come from the social network.

On TikTok, the doctor addresses topics related to psychiatry, such as anxiety, depression and abusive relationships. Her videos range from explanations of terms in the field to humorous performances about the daily life of the profession, in addition to answering users’ questions and analyzing characters from series and films that can yield guidelines in the area.

Today, Maria Clara provides online psychiatric care with people from different parts of the country, in addition to the face-to-face modality. His plan is to invest even more in the production of content on the internet to increase his income.

“As I work with consultations, I’m stuck 24 hours a day and I can’t see many people, both because of time and because of the emotional and cognitive strain. If people like my content, it makes sense to try to turn this into a job. an opportunity for me and it’s working”, he says.

The law and technology researcher at ITS Rio (Rio Institute of Technology and Society), Christian Perrone, says that the transformation of social networks into work shows that the separation between leisure and work is being diluted, especially after the pandemic, when working hours and spaces have become more flexible.

“This erosion of barriers also enters social networks, which were originally personal, but now have more professional use,” he says.

So, despite being an opportunity to boost, using TikTok and other networks for work can bring overload, as Perrone warns.

“This generates a significant potential level of anxiety, because you don’t have a delimited space between the time of work and the time of relaxation. How much time do we spend working? number of hours”, explains the researcher.

Professor Gabriel Cabral’s routine, for example, is divided between 30 weekly class times and recording videos about chemistry for Youtube, Instagram and TikTok. It also has an online course on its own platform. The production of content takes two full days a week, as the teacher is responsible for the entire process, from scripting to editing.

Producing content for high school students since 2017, Cabral was advised by other teachers in November 2020 to go to TikTok as a way to grow on the internet. “I knew the students were going there, so I would also have to be there teaching them chemistry.”

At first, it was difficult, mainly due to the platform format, which only allowed videos of a maximum of one minute. Used to writing and recording longer video lessons, he had to study TikTok and adapt his content to it.

“No one enters TikTok looking for chemistry videos. People are watching several things and you take the opportunity to teach quickly between one and another. Then he learns without even knowing he is studying”, says the professor.

In a short time, TikTok became the network on which Cabral has the largest audience, with more than 650,000 followers, far surpassing those he used for years.

“I think the main advantage of TikTok is to be seen. The algorithm allows you to have a very large reach even if you are not famous, if your content is relevant. It prioritizes quality”, says the professor.

The network, however, does not pay all producers for viewing, which forces them to seek other sources of income. Gabriel, for example, has an online chemistry course for college students and even records videos for Youtube, which offers monetization. Even so, her main source of income continues to be classes in schools and on-site preparatory courses.

Christian Perrone also draws attention to the possible excessive exposure of the professional in the networks, which can have consequences.

“A professional who uses social networks to promote his business has to take good care of what he posts, when he posts, how he does it. On the one hand, he is losing opportunities if he does not enter this environment. another, you need to take good care of your personal image, which is being exposed”, he explains.

Image care is something that pediatric dentist Simone Cesar considers essential in her content producer routine. With over 3 million followers on TikTok, she produces videos in her office with the children she sees. Therefore, she says she always seeks to be careful not to expose patients in any way and to be in line with the profession’s code of ethics.

When it started four years ago, its objective was to try to remove the fear that children had of professionals in their field. That’s why she started recording videos with songs and games in the office. After six months on TikTok, one of the videos went viral and, since then, her profile has been growing steadily, and Simone decided to adopt the name Musical Dentist on the network.

With the success, he even had to change the schedule of appointments, adding 15 minutes at the end of each appointment to record videos with patients. “They love it, ask for it, record stories. Sometimes the anesthetized child even wants to record videos with me”, she says. In addition to voiceovers, the dentist also makes posts related to oral hygiene, with tips to floss and stop biting nails, for example.

The dentist sees an average of 12 children a day and is always looking for new ideas to feed the networks. “It’s very exhausting, I have to divide myself into ten and my head doesn’t stop, because everything can be an idea. But TikTok helped me reinvent my career. It doesn’t monetize me directly, but every week I have a new patient who comes by social networks.”