My name is Rachel and I’m a 19-year-old college student who somehow managed to catapult to TikTok fame almost overnight. I’ve been posting videos on TikTok for a few months now, but up until last week, I was just another influencer wannabe, struggling to grow my following.
That all changed when I saw the news about a 6-year-old boy flying solo for the first time from Philadelphia to visit his grandmother in Fort Myers, Florida for Christmas. The poor kid ended up in Orlando instead, over 170 miles away from his intended destination. As soon as I heard the story, I immediately thought of one of my favourite Christmas movies – Home Alone.
For those unfamiliar with the 1990 film classic, it centers around 8-year-old Kevin McCallister being accidentally left behind when his family rushes off on a Christmas trip to Paris…
In the mad dash to the airport, Kevin gets separated from his parents and winds up having to fend for himself when he returns to his empty home. There, he faces two bumbling burglars using makeshift booby traps and his own wit.
Clearly there were some uncanny similarities between the kid’s ordeal and little Kevin’s.. Still, the parallels were striking enough that my creative juices started flowing. I knew I had to put my own spin by meshing the Home Alone movie trailers with news footage of the kid’s missed flight.
This is where SliceTube came in clutch. SliceTube is essentially a YouTube video cutter tailored for social media that allowed me to seamlessly intercut scenes from the iconic Home Alone movie trailers with news clips reporting the holiday travel mishap. Dragging and dropping segments with SliceTube’s intuitive interface, I quickly created a shareable video contrasting kid’s real-life airport snafu with some of Kevin McCallister’s most epic showdowns defending his family home.
Adding some clever captions and dramatic effect zooms, I was able to produce an engaging “Spirit Airlines Pulled A Home Alone” video in under 15 minutes thanks entirely to SliceTube. Then I posted my creation across all my social platforms, PINNED the video prominently to my TikTok profile, and watched the views start rolling in.
What happened next was truly unbelievable. My Spirit Airlines/Home Alone mashup absolutely exploded almost instantly. Before I knew what was happening, I was gaining thousands of followers per hour as my video spread like wildfire. In just two days, over 1 MILLION people had watched my TikTok creation! All the big news outlets even picked up coverage of my viral video. I was absolutely floored at how rapidly I’d skyrocketed from an average college kid posting dance videos in my dorm room to a bonafide viral sensation.
While my meteoric rise to TikTok fame seems totally surreal, I credit SliceTube and seizing that zeitgeist moment for making it all possible. Spotting a hot trending news topic in a kid’s airline misadventure that perfectly aligned with a nostalgic pop culture classic like Home Alone, then using SliceTube’s effortless tools to combine them was the perfect storm.
So for any aspiring social media influencers wondering how to catapult your account, my advice is keep an eye out for opportunities to put a fresh spin on the news cycle. Be ready to react quickly when a hot story breaks, and utilize game-changing video editing apps like SliceTube to creatively make that story your own! You never know, your chance at viral fame might only be one clever concept away.
