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WWW.OBUSIGNAL.COM | PAGE 3 Dancing to TikTok fame and just having fun

On the cover: Sophomore Hayden Childers shows his TikTok account. Childers gained a large following on the app after creating dance videos with his younger sister Aubrey. (photo by Abby Blankenship) On this page: Childers and his younger sister dance in one of their TikTok videos. (photo courtesy of Hayden Childers) Childers scrolls through his TikTok. He’s a sophomore kinesiology major from Cord, Ark., and a member of the Ouachita baseball team. (photo by Abby Blankenship)

BY RACHEL SANSANO

Staff Writer

TikTok rose in popularity during quarantine, and it remains a global phenomenon. Billions downloaded the app, and most people have seen at least one TikTok. It’s easy to spend hours watching the various types of videos.

Creating those videos, however, is a different story. While TikTok is most well-known for crazy dances, recreating those steps can be a bit tricky. Everyone can dance, but few do it well. Especially on TikTok.

Hayden Childers, a sophomore kinesiology major, knows all about this. Childers became a TikTok star during quarantine, with the help of his 8-year-old sister Aubrey.

“It started out with us just having fun together on the app, and then it turned into something big,” Childers said.

With almost 550,000 followers and a sponsorship from Bang Energy, Childers has done very well. He gives most of the credit to Aubrey, though.

“My little sister is the main source,” Childers said. “Everyone loves her.”

After being sent home from Ouachita during the COVID craziness, Childers and his sister passed the time making TikTok videos.

“People follow us because they want to see us dancing, so when I kept posting more and more of that, it just blew up,” Childers said.

He has solo videos and videos with his roommates, but the ones that are best received involve his sister.

“My page is basically based off of Aubrey and I dancing,” Childers said. “The app is crazy…you can blow up so fast from one good video and that’s what happened to us”.

As with everything, practice makes perfect. TikTok dancing can be a lot harder than it looks, and Childers definitely discovered that. After months of making videos, though, he and Aubrey are much better.

“I thought we were good at dancing, but looking back, we were not good when we first started. But now its way better,” Childers said. “It’s funny to look back at.”

Making these videos does require a commitment. Learning dances alone can take a while, but Childers recommends that you “just have fun with it.”

When Childers started out on the app, he had no intention of being sponsored. But he saw other people on TikTok with sponsorships, and decided to reach out to Bang Energy, a company that sponsors many TikTok creators.

Childers emailed the company but wasn’t expecting much to come from it. Over a month later, Bang responded, offering Childers a year-long contract with their company. It was then that his page grew from 100,000 followers to over 500,000.

The sponsorship requires Childers to make at least two videos a week. Each video has to be at least 15 seconds long and he has to take a sip of a Bang Energy drink in each one.

Ironically, before getting the sponsorship with Bang, Childers had never really given energy drinks a chance. However, since he would have to take a sip of a drink in each video anyways, he decided to try Bang’s energy drinks and ended up loving them.

At the end of the day, though, Childers is making videos because he enjoys it. And as an added bonus, he gets to spend quality time with his little sister. And for Childers and his sister, the goal of their videos is pretty simple.

“We just have fun with it.”