Marcus Darryl : The 18 Year Old Making A Promising Career Out Of Social Media

‘Social media is a distraction. Social media is destructive. Social media is ruining our youth’

We have all heard it before from the older generation, even though those claims are true to a certain extent, there is an emerging market that is growing under may people’s noses. The rise of the social media influencers.

With his personal Instagram page and ‘Rising Talents’ talent page boasting 32K and 45K followers respectively, 18 year old social media influencer & entrepreneur Marcus Darryl, had his entrepreneurial spirit awoken at just 16.

He first contemplated that money could be made if he exploited the gap in the market for displaying young talent, birthing the idea of the Instagram talent page ‘Rising Talents’.

The Origins and Growth of Rising Talents

Coming from Lewisham in south-east London. Rising Talents was conceived in June 2016, after it’s founder and CEO Marcus Darryl observed that there weren’t any Instagram pages which specialised in showcasing young talent in the UK when his gifted friends asked for him to repost videos of them on his popular personal page.

With the Instagram username available, he seized the opportunity to create a platform for people to display their skills in the performing arts and other areas like sports.

Rising Talents’ Instagram page

Since this initial conception, Rising Talents has only gone upwards, gaining more followers and views with each successive week, to the point where its posts hit 100K views in less than two days and hit 1 million impressions weekly.

Moreover, the page receives requests from people all around the world wanting to be featured.

Trials and Tribulations:

Despite the significant successes Rising  Talents has experienced, it has also had its fair share of challenges and obstacles. In the primal stages, there was the barrier of building a team to run the page.

Since the page wasn’t gaining any revenue, the team couldn’t receive pay for their labours.

However, Darryl maneuvered this hurdle by helping his friends with their ventures, so they decided to return the favour  by joining the team for free.

As the page started gaining more momentum and buzz, it met another problem when it was hacked and the username was stolen by an inactive account.

This event threatened to hurt the brand as Darryl considered leaving the page for a while until he was able to get the username back. However, by maintaining an optimistic mindset, Darryl kept the page going, changing its’ username to ‘risingtalents1’.

Seemingly by chance, this name change attracted more followers to the page, though Marcus is still trying to regain the original name to accompany this influx of new followers.

Starting to treat the page as a business, building his networking skills, Darryl has had to remain composed as he received copious amounts of direct messages and emails from people regarding the Instagram page.

This discipline has paid off, giving him the business skills to be a successful entrepreneur.

Achievements and Advice:

Rising Talents has recently taken a big step by growing the interest of investors wanting to buy shares in the company.

Along with this, they made plans to work closely with media company SBTV, but decided to remain independent.

Rising Talents has also received international acknowledgement from celebrities such as professional English footballer Rio Ferdinand and US rapper Lil Mama.

Marcus ascribes his business success to the help from supporters and friends, promoting Rising Talents on social media.

To those who have aspirations as big as Marcus’, he says to ‘chase your dream and GO BIG’, embracing the potential problems as an opportunity to gain experience and wisdom along with networking with like-minded people to build valuable connections for the future.

Future Goals and Plans:

In the near future, Darryl plans to hold an event to create additional buzz for the newly registered company and continue to promote their brand on their YouTube channel, creating new videos of young talent consisting of music videos, series and challenges.

In the long term, Marcus sees himself becoming a successful entrepreneur, hosting international events known all over the world. Through this he hopes to gain financial freedom to truly enjoy all that life has to offer, not needing to work a 9 to 5.

Ultimately, he wants to change people’s lives for the best by helping them towards making their dreams a reality.

Micheal Kolawale