I don’t know about you, but for me, 14.6k followers on Twitter is an impressive number, to say the least. However, for senior Nicole Bloomgarden, her follower count is not that interesting.
As she stretched out across the small set of steps at the end of the senior hallway, Nicole struggled to pinpoint interesting aspects of her life. She pointed out her love for video making and cited her good social skills before recruiting junior Hollman Smith for help.
“Dude, what’s something interesting about me,” Nicole called down the hallway to Smith as he was walking by.
“You’re famous,” Smith said bluntly, without delay.
“I guess I have a little bit of a fan base,” replied Nicole with a laugh.
“A little bit of a fan base” may be an understatement. As of March 23, 2018, the day that I spoke with Nicole, she had just hit 13k followers. As of April 24, Nicole’s follower count has reached 14.6k followers. How did a senior from George Mason High School attain this type of Twitter fame?
“It started with a hashtag: #issagaygirl. My friend sent it to me and I was just like, maybe I should post some flicks. I picked four of my best pictures and I posted to it. I think the first day I got 15,000 likes on it and I went from 400 followers to 4,000 the next day. So I just kept participating in hashtags and when I hit around 9,000 followers I made a YouTube channel,” Nicole explained.
#issagaygirl why not? 🍒 pic.twitter.com/YDGMCp1IhU
— Nicole Bloomgarden (@nicolebloomy) March 4, 2017
#issagaygirl why not? 🍒: Nicole posted this tweet on March 4, 2017 and it instantly blew up over night. This tweet is what led to her internet fame.
With this large of a fan base, Nicole is constantly adding content to both her Twitter and YouTube channel. She posts challenge videos and vlogs on her YouTube and often tweets photos and interacts with her fans via Twitter. It can sometimes be difficult to keep up with tweeting and posting so often.
“You just see 13k, but I can see every follower and when I don’t tweet for two hours, I get unfollowed. That’s why I’m always posting dumb stuff. You have to be active and interact with your followers,” she told me.
Many of her followers are extremely active fans, responding to almost every one of her tweets and viewing all of her content. It’s strange for her to think that so many people know who Nicole is and know things about her, even though she has never met them and she has no idea who they are. Sometimes, people go back all the way to when she created her account when she was younger to find out things about her. People often recognize her in public and ask to take pictures as well.
She described an experience she had with fans at a school basketball game. “We went to Strasburg for a game and afterward, my coach was like, ‘Hey Nicole, you got some fans outside’ and it was the whole Strasburg cheerleading squad and they all wanted pictures with me. It was so funny.”
However, not all of her experiences with fans have been good. After accidentally getting her address in a vlog that she posted to YouTube, her car was egged and she had to take the video down. But, that’s not the craziest experience of all.
Nicole described to me a terrifying situation that she found herself in when she accidentally added her location to one of her tweets when she was at a friend’s house. She realized her mistake quickly and deleted the tweet, but not before many of her followers saw it. One of her fans drove to her location with two boys and when Nicole requested that she leave, things got violent.
“She was like ‘I’m looking for Nicole,’ and I was like ‘Oh my God, it was the tweet,’” Nicole recalled. “I was like, ‘Yo, you got to get out of here,’ and one of the guys punched my friend in the face.”
Although her mother hates when Nicole gets recognized in public and finds the idea of so many people knowing her daughter very creepy, her mother watches all of Nicole’s videos and is one of her biggest fans.
Although Nicole is a star on social media, her sociability is not limited to the internet. Multiple times during our conversation, various students stopped to say hi to Nicole, who is always up for meeting new people and making new friends.
“If there’s a group of people I’ve never met before, I wouldn’t be embarrassed to go up and talk to them,” Nicole said.
“Nicole is a fun person to be around. She’s always smiling and talking to people,” senior Thomas Reeves said.
Even though this type of internet fame is the modern dream for this social media dominated world, Nicole takes her internet fame with a grain of salt.
“Ever since I got more followers, I have to think way more about what I say and I have to edit my tweets, which I don’t like,” she said.
And what if her Twitter got deleted?
“I don’t think that much of having followers on Twitter and social media in general because it can just be taken away and everyone could just decide to stop following you one day. When I’m getting likes and stuff, it’s just cool and it’s cool to say ‘oh follow me on twitter’, but it’s not really big,” Nicole explained.
However, Nicole plans to continue being active on her social media accounts when she graduates from high school and moves into college. She believes that her life will be more interesting when she graduates, so she’ll have more material to post. She plans on going to Virginia Commonwealth University in the fall and hopes to walk on for their basketball team. Nicole also wants to use her skills in social media to become a sports broadcaster after college.
With Nicole’s bubbly and extroverted personality, it’s not surprising that people are drawn to her, both in person and on social media, and college will only open new doors for this social media star.
You can follow Nicole on twitter @nicolebloomy and on YouTube.
