Like millions of people in the spring of 2020, Ziora Ajeroh was a pandemic graduate. As they started college at community college the following fall, they decided to start making videos on TikTok. Nearly a year later, Ajeroh has 61.8k followers and 5.5 million likes on the platform.
“TikTok now occupies a significant portion of my time, especially since that’s my main source of income,” they say. After classes, Ajeroh spends their afternoons doing their makeup to make content for social media. At night, they come up with tweets and save them in their drafts so they can be tweeted sporadically throughout the next day.
Although Ajeroh posts most of their content on their main account (@zioraaaa), they have also contributed to collective accounts like the Black Leftist Hype House (@youngblackleftists) and Negroes of TikTok (@n0treboot).
Both accounts have gotten a great amount of exposure. The Black Leftist Hype House was profiled in Teen Vogue and Negroes of TikTok has a fanbase so loyal that they currently have 143.4k followers despite getting banned on TikTok numerous times due to racists reporting their accounts.
With a large online presence, there comes trolls, haters, and drama. After the Black Leftist Hype House’s Teen Vogue feature, members of the collective received racist hate and doxxing threats. “Both creators and consumers of content can be so mean, and I never really thought people had the capacity to be that angry over social media,” Ajeroh says.
At the end of 2021, Ajeroh started having second thoughts about content creation. “I was actually contemplating quitting TikTok because I wasn’t making much money,” they say. “I told myself I was going to give it one more try and sat down one day and made a few videos and thought ‘if these don’t do well, I’m quitting, I’m not doing it anymore.’”
To their surprise, every single video Ajeroh made that day reached a minimum of 100,000 likes. Around the same time, their Twitter content was also doing very well. People began to recognize Ajeroh on both platforms. They began to see tweets about them saying things like “I just saw you on my TikTok For You page, it seems like social media is pushing a Ziora agenda!”
On top of being a college student and content creator, Ajeroh also works at Sephora and does hair on the side. Because of their established online presence, customers always recognize them. “They’ll ask me, ‘do you have a TikTok or a Twitter?’ and recognize me from there,” they say.
“It feels weird, I’m not going to lie, especially with my Twitter presence growing,” Ajeroh says. “Before, Twitter really used to be my personal diary where I would tweet anything I wanted, but I can’t really do that anymore because I have so many eyes on me.”
Ajeroh wants to eventually attend law school and is currently studying sociology. They do not want to be a full-time content creator, but for now, they are sticking to it.
