PP 1 - Demographics

 

Elsa Nordström

Elsa Nordström is a 21-year-old girl from Sweden working as an Au pair in Australia. An Au Pair is a young person between 17 and 30 years old who stays with a local Host family and learns their language and culture in exchange for accommodation and pocket money. I chose to write about Elsa in this assignment because of her recent increase in followers on her social media platform TikTok and her strategy to increase her amount of followers.

Elsa started her Au pair experience in Florida in the fall of 2021. She has been posting on her TikTok account @elsanordstrom about her experience working as an Au pair. She films and edits videos such as days in her life as an Au pair, storytimes about her Au pair experience, and Q&A's about how it is to work as an Au pair. It is very common for Swedish people to work as an Au pair for a bit right after they are done with High School, so Elsa quickly gained loads of followers on her TikTok account and has today 83.6k followers on the TikTok account. Her content provides good and useful information for individuals who also might want to work as an Au pair and have questions about how it is. Elsa has not been afraid of telling the truth about her experience and was not hiding the fact that she had to move from her first host family because they did not work well together. By speaking so openly about the negative side that might happen as an Au pair, it makes her audience feel that if it happens to them it is not something that only happens to them. 

Elsa's followers are enjoying her videos of her daily life as an Au pair, and that is what they are expecting of her. They want to see her lifestyle and all the travel she does, and they don't get disappointed. She is very consistent with her content and she is doing a very good job of making sure her daily vlogs rarely look the same, so there is always something new and interesting in every single video. I enjoy watching her videos because of her positive energy, and how she shows both the good and the bad of working as an Au pair. The transitions in her videos are good as well which makes it very smooth to watch her videos and the videos she posts do not come off as "choppy" and hard to watch.

Link to a Vlog from Florida

Link to a Vlog from Australia 

Recently Elsa created a second TikTok account, @elsanordstromm, where she is posting the same type of videos, but now she is speaking English, instead of only speaking Swedish as she does on her other account. In only three days Elsa went from having 3k followers on her English-speaking account to having 40k followers. At first, I thought her decision to add an account where she speaks English was to grow her audience since she is based in Australia, and the people over there do not speak Swedish. I do think that is a reason for it, but once she revealed who her host family was I quickly understood more about her strategy. Her host mom is an Australian influencer with a big following, @whenkatiemetharry. Since her host mom was already posting about them hiring an Au pair Katie's followers were already curious to see who this new Au pair would be. With Elsa only having a Swedish-speaking account Katie's followers would probably not have engaged that much in Elsa's own account because they would not understand what she is talking about. This is why her creating an English-speaking account is very very smart because then her host mom's followers would easily transition into her own followers as well since people seemed to be interested in the whole Au pair "exchange", both from the mom's perspective but also from the Au pair too. This is of course nothing I know for sure but I think I am making a very accurate guess. Also, her being based in Australia helps speaking English so she can get a more spread-out audience from other places other than just Sweden. This makes it possible for her to grow an international audience and a larger following. 

Elsa also has an Instagram account with the username @elsanordstromm with an amount of 6.3k followers. There is no Au pair-related content on her Instagram platform and I do think that she could gain interest from followers but also gain interest from companies to sponsor or work with her if she would start posting her Au pair content on Instagram as well. It could also give her another opportunity to gain money from her media content if she is using both TikTok and Instagram as her platforms to show her experience as an Au pair. I have seen many influencers today post the exact same videos on their TikTok accounts as well as on their Instagram accounts, to reach a bigger audience and earn more money. I am very curious as to why she is not as active on her Instagram account, her recent post was posted on October 9th last year. Instagram is also a good way of gaining a greater amount of followers, and with her love for travel, it could for sure help her on the economic side of things. 

One thing I like with her content compared to many other Swedish Au pairs, is that she is speaking very truthfully about the experience. Many other Swedish Au pairs are only sharing positive stories about their experience, painting it up as if there is nothing negative about it. While Elsa is very open about the negative situations she has been in, and how homesickness affects her every now and then. As someone who is away from my family most of the year, I can relate to how she feels which makes it more fun to watch her videos.