The journey to one finding his or her path is often unpredictable. At every step of the way, life gives us a fork in the road. While some decisions may be agonizing, with others, a simple nudge can put you on a highway to success. That’s how 27-year-old Batsheva Haart became a social media powerhouse.
For Haart, her nudge came at a Teen Vogue summit in LA that took her simple intrigue about TikTok to next levels, becoming one of the platform's rising stars. “I haven’t looked back since,” Haart told us. So far, she has built a following of almost 1 million users. That’s no small feat considering the average user has under 1,000. She’s also collected over 15 million likes on her posts and gets hundreds of thousands of views for just about each of them. In fact, one of her videos about the trend of tossing rice in the air to spell out messages captured over 2.5 millions views. To put that into perspective, around the same number of people tuned in to watch an NBA playoff game in August. You can also find Haart on Instagram showcasing her style in clothes and accessories.
Like most of us, Haart, even only at just 27, has already been met with quite a few forks in the road. According to her LinkedIn page, she had a short stint working at a restaurant, a couple of go-arounds as a hairstylist, and then finally on the path of fashion and design. She eventually found herself at FIT studying accessories design. After earning her associates degree, Haart was at another fork in the road, forced to make the decision: do I continue on the path to earn my bachelor’s degree or take a chance? Her “intrigue” in TikTok and an eye-opening experience visiting their WeWork office during the Teen Vogue summit, Haart decided to switch majors and study direct marketing and interactive marketing.
Going with her hunch put her on the fast track to success. Her advice to aspiring social media influencers, don’t be “afraid to just go for it.” She added, “You are your biggest critique. Don’t wait until you feel like your poses are perfect or that you have the best feed to start putting out content. Do it! You will learn as you go.”
She also cautioned that success won’t come easy. “If you want something, you need to work for it. Give yourself time to grow and don’t give up.”
Haart’s decision to ditch the accessories design route and follow her heart down the marketing path wasn’t just a hunch. She spent a lot of time researching that helped her validate the decision. A mistake she believes a lot of aspiring social media influencers make is that “they don’t do enough research into the industry and just expect things to change for them,” she said. “You need to do the work to see a change in your career.”
Her work is opening up paths for her beyond TikTok. She recently attended model camp with supermodel Coco Rocha. She’s hoping to be “more confident in front of the camera and see where it takes me.” Don’t be surprised if the next fork in Haart’s road leads her runways and magazine pages.