Marie runs a one-woman production, but her videos look like they’d need about 5! I talked with Marie to find out the how’s and why’s of what she’s been doing across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Even though Marie is huge in the acting and social media space now, her initial plan was to go into teaching, since she loved to teach and bond with kids and was quite good at French and literature. At the time, Marie had a set in stone plan of “I want to be here when I’m 25 and then by 27 I’ll be doing this,” but then the pandemic hit and shut everything down. During that time, she downloaded TikTok and eventually uploaded her first video. It was a dance cover that was totally outside of her comfort zone, but TikTok helped Marie to be unapologetically herself because her content was being shown entirely to strangers, as opposed to Instagram that focuses on showing whatever you post to people close to you.
Since that first video, Marie’s editing and costumes have been consistently improving, bringing her to the point where she can make things like this! This type of creativity started back when she was younger and would enjoy editing pictures of her and her friends. When Marie started making TikToks, she picked up the basics of editing from YouTube and went off to figure out the rest while making her own videos. She says TikTok lends itself well to fast improvement because of how short each individual video is, so you end up iterating on past mistakes quickly. If you combine this with a growth mindset and learn from the successes and failures of other creators, you have Marie’s formula for rapid improvement!
In addition to TikTok, Marie is also on Instagram and YouTube, both of which have different audiences that interact with her content and each other differently. On YouTube Her YouTube’s growth is especially fascinating, since it went from around 2k subscribers this January to over 1.3M now in November! Last year, Marie was posting on YouTube once every 3-4 months, but in January of this year she pivoted to daily posts on there, just like TikTok. On January 25th, her account exploded from 2k subscribers to 100k essentially overnight. YouTube enabled a massive snowball effect for Marie, since when someone watched one of her videos they’d go binge all the old ones as well, making everything explode all at the same time!
As mentioned before, the audiences between these platforms are totally different. YouTube comments tend to have a lot of quotes from the video, like “At 3:14 she…,” Instagram tends to be an older audience, and on her most recent TikTok video 4 of the top 5 comments were some variation of “WE STAN STELLA MARIE!” The algorithms on these platforms are also different. TikTok is quite volatile, with view counts fluctuating massively based on the algorithm, while YouTube is most stable with the majority of her shorts on there reaching over 1M views. TikTok’s algorithm is so hit or miss that Marie actually had one fan who was following her but hadn’t seen any of her videos in over 2 years!
This is all amazing, but why? What’s the thing that drives Marie to improve her skills and build communities like this? To be honest it’s quite simple, it’s about bringing joy to people and lightening the heavy world we live in. Even if it’s just a little, like 10 minutes, then Marie’s job is complete. She also looks up to 2 of the GOATS in acting and work ethic, Will Smith and The Rock. In fact, I’m super jealous because she got to meet Dwayne Johnson a couple weeks back, which you can see in this post!
What’s next for Marie? Acting is one long-term goal, perhaps transitioning to working with Netflix or Disney. She knows it’ll be difficult to break into the industry because she doesn’t have a traditional film background, but with her ever-growing reel of videos across three-platforms, casting directors will be able to find her content, see exactly what she’s about, and think “yes, I want Marie for this role!” For now the plan is to keep moving forward with the content she’s putting out for her Stans right now, and if you want to join them you can find Marie on TikTok @laframbuesaa, Instagram @laframbuesaa, and YouTube @Laframbuesaa.
