A Harvard for influencing does not yet exist—it’s only a matter of time—but the school of Tina Meeks comes close. Want to know what to do with your hands in a photo? She’ll send you a link. Want your interiors to look more Nancy Meyers and less “C.S.I.”? She’ll tell you what light bulbs to buy. Want to quit your nine-to-five and become the sort of trusted personality who makes six figures a year documenting and distributing your life? She’ll coach you, for five hundred dollars an hour.
“Not everyone can make three hundred thousand dollars a year,” Meeks said the other day, referring to the sum that she earned in 2020, “but if you can make an extra three thousand, or an extra thirty thousand, that’s still life-changing for many people.” She was videoconferencing from her house, in Virginia, and had on a white tank top, her hair in two high pigtails. “So many moms and wives get lost in their family life, but you can still do really big things for yourself in the midst of that.”
A former Army reservist, Meeks, who is thirty-four, intended to be “the cool auntie who travelled the world with her military career,” she said. “Then I got pregnant.” She became an insurance adjuster, first for cars—“very fast-paced, because people literally get into accidents all the time”—then for property. “Aside from the police, you’re the first call that most people make,” she said. “It’s not like I was a brain surgeon, but to be able to talk them off the ledge—it was fulfilling.”
She joined Instagram in 2012, to share family photos. Then house photos. Then food photos. Five years and another child later, her husband told her,“If you’re going to spend as much time on social media as you do, you should find a way to make money from it.” She dove deep into YouTube. “That’s how I learned photo composition, how I honed my aesthetic,” she said. She tagged brands. “The day that Children’s Place shared my post was, like, the best day ever. They didn’t even pay me.” She came up with formulas for equitable compensation: her baseline rate for a single photo is the number of dollars equal to four per cent of her following on Instagram, which is currently sixty-seven thousand five hundred. Sponsorships allowed her to quit her fifty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year day job, at the end of 2019, by which time she had three kids. The drama of 2020 was good for business. “After the social unrest and the amplify-Black-voices movement, brands that had offered me five hundred before suddenly had a two-thousand-dollar budget,” she said. “No one wanted to be called out for not paying influencers of color their worth.” Why share her trade secrets? “It’s a fourteen-billion-dollar industry,” she said. “They can’t give it all to one person.”
Meeks occasionally offers free advice over Zoom. Her last session, in May, was derailed by traffic. “I’ve been stuck on the interstate, in park, for forty-five minutes,” she told her Zoom guests. A child wailed in the back seat. She fielded questions anyway.
“How do you become comfortable with pics and videoing?” Tana Almerico (942 followers) asked.
“Look in the mirror and practice,” Meeks said. “Learn your best angles.”
“I don’t have a place in my house that’s really pretty,” Toni Jones (3,620 followers) said. “Is it worthwhile to rent an Airbnb?”
“Once you start, you’re going to have to keep up with that,” Meeks said. “Work with the space you have. The main thing is good lighting.” She continued, “Most homes have very muted yellow lighting. Go to the store and get daylight light bulbs. It is going to change your life. It’s also going to blind you, just a little bit.”
“I only have one child, who’s one year old,” Kourtney Marsh (22,400 followers) said. “Does family size matter?”
“It’s a factor,” Meeks replied. “But you have a baby. Babies just make us spend money on everything.”
After a brief spell of dead air (a tunnel, a few plaintive cries of “Mommy”), Meeks announced, panting slightly, that she was home. Next question.
“I’m almost fifty. My kids are ten and twelve,” TaJuana Robinson (927 followers) said. “My day-to-day life is not that exciting. What do I even talk about that would be of interest to anybody?”
“Your experiences with tween and teen-age girls,” Meeks said. “People get caught up in needing to have this exciting life. The most exciting thing to happen to me today was being stuck in traffic and having to tell y’all about it.” She added, “On a very surface level, I’m just home with my kids.” ♦
