How Aba Asante Turned TikTok Fame into a Marketing Internship at Crocs  

Roughly three-in-five young people ages 13 to 26 said they would become an influencer if given the opportunity, according to research from Morning Consult’s latest influencer playbook. Oberlo reports that almost 138.5 million Americans are on Instagram, and TikTok CEO Shou Chew claims 170 million Americans are on his platform.  

Social media is here to stay, bringing with it a series of challenges, but also opportunities. These are realities Aba Asante ’25 (business management and marketing) has lived for herself via her personal journey as a social media influencer and through her work this summer as an intern at HeyDude shoes, one of Crocs’ recently acquired brands. 

From Side Hustle to Internet Personality 

Asante has always had a creative spirit and a willingness to try new things. She started using TikTok just as the app began to take off, right before the Covid-19 pandemic. She watched what people were doing to get lots of views, engagement and positive feedback. “I would study it, and I would note things like: How did they word the captions? Was it dramatic or click-bait-y?” she said. 

With more time on her hands due to the pandemic, Asante started making her own videos, consistently posting three or four times a day on topics she cared about in beauty and fashion, commenting and engaging with her audience to build her platform. She worked her way up to two million followers on TikTok. After hitting that landmark, a social management team from Los Angeles reached out and helped Asante broker influencer brand deals with companies like Netflix, Dunkin Donuts, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, YouTube, ASOS and Morphe.  

What had started as a side hustle was now a real job with real revenue––as well as real time demands and realities. When the pandemic waned and Asante returned to college, keeping up with her influencer content became a challenge. Around that time, Asante also began to see the darker side of social media.  

“Everything is fake,” she says. “Any trending song that started blowing up is because somebody is behind it. Recording studios will send influencers a crazy amount of money to post ‘organic videos’ and hide that it was an advertisement so people will use the sound. Every product, even ‘not sponsored’ ones, are still sponsored in some way.” 

From in Front of the Screen to Behind the Scenes 

Asante chose to slow down on her personal social media, only posting when she had the time and motivation. But her passion for content, innovation and creativity persisted, helping her land a social media internship at Crocs. Similar to her influencer experience, her internship requires her to engage in “social listening”––watching different platforms’ content to see what sounds, people, influencers, products or ideas are trending, and what their target audiences are searching for and talking about. Then, she comes up with creative ways to help her team and other teams in Crocs’ marketing department incorporate all of it while staying true to the brand.  

The greatest lesson her internship taught her is how much social media has changed and continues to change. “It’s crazy how important, time-sensitive and time-consuming things are in the social media world. I came into this job thinking I knew everything, but something could be set in stone, and then five seconds later it’s changed. We were going to post something last week that took me a couple days to make, and then that day something else was trending instead and we had to pivot to go in a completely different direction.” 

One of her best projects was a collaboration between HeyDude and My Little Pony. Asante researched the My Little Pony brand for three weeks, including the personal accounts of individual followers of the brand. She discovered they had a very passionate audience who cared about certain details, like the exact colors used for specific ponies or references to the different seasons of the brand’s TV show. For the collaboration to succeed, Asante and her team needed to show they understood both brands in an authentic way.  

 “We had to make sure that we were getting all the information right, like captioning things in a witty way,” she said. “There’s just so much thought that goes into every little thing that you would have never thought of, like the colors we use or the amount of punctuation or emojis. Everything is thorough and thought out.” All that hard work paid off, as the collaboration was a huge success. 

Making One’s Voice Heard 

The biggest reason Asante has always loved social media and wishes to continue working in the industry, despite its challenges, is because of how social media makes it easy for people, especially those in underrepresented communities, to be heard. 

“No matter how many followers you have, social media gives everybody a voice. At least one person on the internet is going to see what you post. The positive side of social media is that you have a platform where you can give your opinion while opening your mind to a bunch of different things, ideas and experiences. That is what makes it beautiful.”