Ben Hampton
If you’ve been paying attention to the rise of influencer marketing over the past five years, then you remember the explosion of internet celebrities that came from the video platform, Vine. In fact, some of the biggest social media influencers on Instagram today got their start on the micro-video app that demanded stories and creativity be jammed into 6-second clips.
But what a lot of people don’t know about Vine is that it also greatly encouraged influencer collaborations. Vine was still lagging in popularity in terms of other more popular social platforms, and the still-growing influencers there needed to find ways to get their Vines in front of new audiences.
The result?
A handful of “Vine cliques” started to form. King Bach would make videos with Liane V, Nash Grier would make videos with Cameron Dallas, and even model Amanda Cerny saw value in building a personal brand on Vine and eventually jumped into the mix. Eventually, Vine videos began to feature not just one other influencer, but handfuls of them, turning a single 6-second clip into an exposure opportunity for all of them.
These are just a few names out of the dozens of Internet famous entertainers that used Vine as a launching point for wildly successful careers—built entirely on social media. And one of them, Jake Paul, decided to take it a step further and turn these “social cliques” that were already happening organically into a full-fledged social agency.
Paul’s agency is called Team 10, which features an impressive roster of social influencers, each of whom seem to possess the same inherent knowledge of how to create content people can’t help but Follow and engage with. Team 10 recently raised $1M in funding, and one of their investors includes serial entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk.
Now, Team 10 has a new player, and he’s young. Really young.
Meet Ben Hampton, 6 years old and the son of Branden Hampton, one of the largest independent social media publishers in the world—with over 50 million followers across various accounts. If you take a look around Ben Hampton’s Instagram, you can tell that his content has many of the same qualities as the rest of his Team 10 teammates. It’s casual and friendly, but also purposefully funny. He even has collaboration photos and videos with other high-profile influencers with hundreds of thousands, even millions of Followers.
I was fortunate to get to chat with Ben Hampton a bit about his interests in social media, and what gets him excited about creating content online at such a young age.
“I like my followers the most,” he said. “When I post things, I try to think about what they like to see me doing. And Jake and Team 10 have a lot of fun together. They’re always doing pranks, playing games, jumping on trampolines and joking around with each other.”
He went on to explain he’s launching a company that will sell products and merchandise themed around charities and purposes, then a portion of revenues will directly benefit those causes.
“The company raises money for different things, like saving animals. So when you buy our products, we give some of the money to help those things,” he said, with the spirit of a young entrepreneur.
He also shared that he might want to join the army when he grows up, because he wants to figure out ways to help the earth. But he also likes making videos, and even at a young age is interested in the business aspect of things.
It really is amazing to have watched the rise of Influencer marketing, and how what was originally a weird hobby (posting videos and pictures of yourself online) has turned into a full-fledged career path. Having a personal brand and an audience online has practically become a prerequisite for being a thought leader, in any industry, and makes the road to success exponentially easier.