We recently connected with Rito Ngobest and have shared our conversation below.

Rito , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Before we talk about all of your success, let’s start with a story of failure. Can you open up about a time when you’ve failed?

It’s not really a failure but I lost what I’ve worked for after a year and half of consistently posting content on my Instagram and growing my page, someone decided to hack me and succeeded. The following day after being hacked, I opened a new page and the people that used to follow me on the hacked account came to support the new one. That little loss made me work two times better than I used to. That even led me to getting a dream brand collaboration, the brand noticed me withing 2 weeks after the new account. That’s not all, I have more brands to work with than before. So the lesson I’ve learned in this industry is that, failing does not mean it’s the end of your world, IT’S JUST THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING. Another lesson is that as content creators, we should watch out for the hackers or the scammers.

Rito , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am Rito Ngobest, a South African passionate fashion content, a dancer and an aspiring model. Some consider me an influencer, I get it why,that’s because of my fashion sense that some people get an inspiration from and the dance videos I make, especially on Tik Tok. Because I touch a lot of people’s hearts, I collaborate with brands to promote their businesses and offerings. I am a fashion enthusiastic, I focus on few goals at a particular moment so currently I incorporate fashion and dance in my videos.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I started taking social media a bit serious last year (2023) March. Starting from Tik Tok to Instagram was much easier for me. I was well received on both platforms because they enjoy my fashion content on Instagram and my dances on Tik Tok, some even say we’ve never seen something like this before, “a clean Tsonga boy who loves traditional music is so rare”. I consistently kept on giving the audience what they wanted, that’s how I’ve built an audience on social media, plus my audience is so loyal to me and I’ll forever be grateful for that. Sending them love.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

For someone who’s not familiar with what I do, they might call it “a lot of unnecessary work” because they don’t know what comes next. Most non-creatives find content creation useless and we should be in the offices (that’s what they consider real jobs) but they don’t know the benefits of this. I wish they knew that there’s money and brand deals, you don’t get such deals by sitting in the office.