Lauren Brown stood in front of Founders Library, phone in hand, taking selfies of her cut crease eyeshadow makeup look when a student approached her, expressing how much of a fan she was of her work.
It was Brown’s first time back on the Yard since she graduated in the spring of 2022 and pursued a career as an influencer.
The Howard alumna said interactions like these and helping others motivate her to create the content she does.
“I get a lot of inspiration to create based on, ‘How can I show this in a way or reframe some people’s thinking about some things?’” she said.
Brown, who’s known as @raggedyroyal on Instagram and TikTok, has produced beauty and lifestyle content since 2016 and is one of several Howard alumni and student content creators to leverage their ties to the university and acknowledge influencing as a legitimate career.
The Washington native began her career on Snapchat, posting makeup tutorials and skits. After becoming frustrated with the platform’s 24-hour expiration date, she moved to Instagram and started to get reposted by brands and other social media pages.
She spent her first year on campus filming content in the bottom bunk of a College Hall North triple dorm room.
“The top bunk was so low that I couldn’t step in my bed, so that’s where I was creating all these looks from. And now, looking back, I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy.’ But it was a lot of fun.” Brown said.
The beauty influencer said Howard gave her opportunities to build her platform, like her first brand deal with a local lash company during her freshman year, and taught Brown how to navigate a social scene and maintain a public image and global following.
“I actually can’t post everybody’s flyer at Howard because I have followers in South Africa, and they don’t know what that is,” Brown said. “So I learned having to cater to an audience that is both so local and also so global on the same page.”
With 241,500 followers on TikTok and 165,000 on Instagram, Brown has produced sponsored content for prominent beauty brands like Benefit Cosmetics, Too Faced, and NYX.
But she’s not the only Howard influencer to collaborate with big-name brands.
Jade Johnson, a strategic legal communications major, and Jadah Clay, a musical theater major, are juniors at Howard who make up the social media duo @jadeandjadah. The roommates went viral in 2022 after posting a TikTok reenacting an R. Kelly interview with Gayle King and have since garnered brand deals with Pepsi, Verizon, Tubi and JBL.
“The money that we make really is from just the brands,” Clay said.
In addition to engaging in brand partnerships and selling merchandise, content creators on TikTok and Instagram can earn a certain amount of money depending on how many views a video receives.
While their viral video was part of a larger trend where content creators record themselves re-enacting a viral video as it played on a laptop, the pair continues making similar videos for their total audience of over 600,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok.
Johnson believes they will earn more money as they continue to grow and said that being affiliated with Howard has helped their success.
“If we weren’t in college and we were doing these videos, it would still blow up. But Howard definitely has helped with endorsements,” Johnson said.
TikTok uses location services to share relevant content with users, showing popular local videos, targeted ads and personalized “For You” pages, which often feature content from Howard students on local feeds.
Andre Surratt, @superfunnycoolguy69 on TikTok, is a freshman film major who has accumulated nearly 400,000 likes for his skits on life in Drew Hall and other aspects of being a student. He said seeing similar content is what influenced him to come to Howard.
#HowardUniversity has garnered over 39,000 posts on TikTok and over half a million on Instagram.
“It’s a flex,” said Kyla Davis, a content creator and junior maternal and child health major, to be associated with the university.
However, not all student influencers believe the job is the most glamorous of undertakings.
“It takes a lot of time. There’s a lot of people to cater to. There’s a lot of people to reply to. There’s a lot of things to film, a lot of things to edit, a lot of things to do on the back end that people don’t see,” said beauty content creator Lauren Brown.
Howard alumna and lifestyle content creator Jayla Thomas said it’s difficult to create a work-life balance as a student making social media content.
“I’m the type of person who does benefit from phone breaks and from social media breaks, but it’s very difficult for me to do that,” she said. “People might feel upset because I haven’t responded to them and I’m posting. But the post might have been scheduled already. That’s my job, so it’s completely separate.”
Kai Gibson is a sophomore journalism major at Howard. She has over 580,000 followers across her two TikTok accounts, @jbeinghonest_ and @_kais.spam_, released a book, and typically posts videos of herself reading poetry about heartbreak and healing.
She said she was inspired to attend Howard after she saw herself go viral on TikTok for rapping along to Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares” on a campus visit during Homecoming in 2022.
However, after she arrived, the content creator believed the content she was exposed to didn’t show the full spectrum of experiences.
“The media did not portray the Howard runaround, the amount of things that I was going to have to do, the amount of times I’d actually have to stand up for myself and the staff. That’s just what happened, but the media didn’t show me that.” Gibson said.
Copy edited by Anijah Franklin
