This week, we caught up with one of our favorite dance influencers, Sonal Devraj, co-founder of @teamnaach that started at a dance studio back in the year 2014.
Sonal Devraj, popularly known as @bhaiyajismile, is currently one of most sought after and popular dancing sensations on the internet and the covers of the famous and iconic Bollywood numbers garner huge amounts of traction and love from her audience.
Sonal is an extremely passionate, energetic and graceful dancer and loves to create good content for her audience. She says “that’s all that’s important to me right now, put out the best content and the rest is secondary”!
Who or what inspired you to become an influencer?
So I never was really looking to be an influencer. I was just out there putting out videos of the dance routines I was choreographing, up on different social media platforms.
This started gaining a lot of popularity especially the Bollywood routines. Well, then the following kept increasing and I ended up becoming a dance influencer, but as I said it was never a planned thing that I wanted to be a social media influencer.
What would you consider your most successful brand collaborations? Why do you think they worked out so well?
Out of all the brand collaborations that I’ve done, the most successful one and the one that I enjoyed the most was by the brand ‘Mohey’ which deals with ethnic clothing.
I had to do a Bollywood dance video and change into different Indian Wear. Shooting this video was a lot of fun and I personally enjoyed working on it.
This worked really well for me since my audience associates me with Bollywood and of course dance.
Tell us the truth – how much time do you spend on social media? 🙂
*Laughs* honestly during this lockdown situation, i think maybe twice or thrice a day and mostly at night. That’s only because the entire day goes in Netflixing and binge watching series. 🙂
What advice would you give to brands who are just starting out with influencers?
Well one of the first things I would say is to understand the kind of audience that an influencer caters to. The second being, what kind of messaging will work on their platform. This gives the influencers the opportunity to be more creative and as authentic as possible. And thirdly, brands don’t necessarily need to work with the big names all the time.
All the brand needs is influencers on board who have good content and a loyal following, if they have this, then they have a successful campaign to themselves.
Who’s your dance idol and why?
I don’t really have any dance idols as such. There are soon many talented and amazing dancers out there and each of them are so different in their styles and genres.
I look up to everyone, they inspire me to do what I do in their own different ways. 🙂
What’s your dream, or ultimate goal? Where is this path heading for you?
My end goal, *laughs*, I haven’t really thought of it that way. Well I can say for now my focus is my dance. I aim to create work that my audience would like and enjoy. I want to continue doing what I love doing and be proud of it. Yeah so basically, making good content, that’s my current goal the rest is all secondary!
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Stay home and Stay safe.
Happy Reading 🙂