Hankwitz declined to say how much he brings in annually, but acknowledged that he makes more than $500,000. He also said he’s built a portfolio valued at about $1.3 million since March 2020, in part with the equity received from the brands he represents.
Social media can be a lucrative business for those with big follower counts and the prowess to push customers toward financial products. Creators can get paid anywhere from $100 to $1,500 for a swipe-up advertisement on their Instagram stories to $1,000 to $10,000 for a single post on their feed, according to figures from Brian Hanly, CEO of Bullish Studio, a talent agency for influencers. On TikTok, the cost of one post can range from $2,500 to $20,000 depending on the video’s virality and the creator’s follower count.
To get there, creators have to develop a certain persona — and on FinTok and its Instagram counterpart, there’s enough variety for everyone. Creators from a variety of ages, backgrounds and ethnicities offer advice about how to open a Roth IRA, how to invest in real estate, how trading options makes more sense if you compare it to buying makeup, or how to use astrology to predict the price of Bitcoin.
Take Sacks, aka Mrs. Dow Jones — the influencer with 215,000 Instagram followers. She explains compound interest by comparing it to Billie Eilish’s fame, or Bitcoin to Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s rekindled romance.
Sacks, 30, began her career in comedy, working for TV host David Letterman and Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. Learning about money was a struggle for Sacks, but one way to make it more relatable for her was to compare it to pop culture and celebrity gossip. On that premise, she launched Mrs. Dow Jones in 2017, and her following has since flourished.
“I created what I needed, and other people needed it too. If you’re following me, you like pop culture, so we have that shared language,” said Sacks. “If you can understand the human relationship between two celebrities, then you can understand any financial concept.”
Four years after launching Mrs. Dow Jones, Sacks has signed with a talent agency, and has built a team of people, including an assistant and a manager, to help her negotiate six-figure deals with brands. She started partnering with Wealthfront two years ago.
“She’s a financial pop star. When have you heard that take on anything?” said Wauck of Wealthfront. “The way that she relates everything to pop culture is just so genius.”
Sacks is also taking advantage of the recent demand for personal finance content by providing a course on her website, Finance Is Cool. On Monday, her followers will be able to purchase a $115 course designed to teach them how to manage their money. Among other pop culture references in the course, Sacks used the characters from the TV show “Friends” to guide her followers through building an emergency fund.
Other People’s Money
While social media is allowing companies to reach young customers faster than ever, they need to ensure against working with internet stars who are fast and loose with information.
“There’s so much room for growth,” said Hanly. “There’s not enough financial creators out there to basically take on the amount of opportunity that’s coming in, and there’s not nearly enough high-quality, preaching-the-good-word financial creators.”
Personal finance content on social media has gone viral for offering questionable — even flat out wrong — advice, while get-rich-quick schemes have attempted to lure in novice investors. That’s taken many forms, including videos on how to become a millionaire by selling dog beds on Amazon through dropshipping, how using a debit card makes you financially irresponsible, how to “make a lot of money” day-trading foreign exchange or what stocks to buy and when to buy them.
That’s why TikTok tightened its rules. In May, the social media company said it would take action against content creators who post sponsored videos for financial services and products without clear labels. Companies can still pay financial influencers for posts, but the new restrictions are meant to ensure that creators are transparent when disclosing commercial links.
Since then, Betterment said it moved all of the content from its TikTok influencers over to Instagram and Instagram Reels. Hankwitz has not re-entered into an agreement with Betterment for TikTok videos since. Wealthfront said it was optimizing other channels, like YouTube and Instagram, and instead was mostly relying on TikTok’s paid advertising platform rather than posts through influencers.
As fraudulent content and misinformation run rampant and unchecked, financial corporations looking for quality creators are putting in place hefty vetting processes.
Betterment’s compliance and legal teams perform detailed reviews of their social media partners’ scripts. Influencers will then shoot the video and send it back to compliance for a second review. Wealthfront said that it does extensive background checks on the influencers that get selected to partner with them before signing any contracts. It also includes stipulations in the contract that allow Wealthfront to cancel if certain terms are violated by the creators.