Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Semir Smajlovic. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Semir, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

The first experience that I had with social media was in the early 2017s, when Vine and other platforms were just starting to kick off and me and a former friend wanted to become YouTubers, but things turned around and we never had a chance to achieve that goal. Years later, I had a passion of attending events and helping struggling small businesses in promoting their business and giving them the needed exposure so they can get more visitors, so I started Saint Louis Events. Saint Louis Events has sparked my joy for the social media world and what potential an creator and influencer has on bringing positivity to peoples lives, whether it’s saving them time on not having to search for events, or helping set events up for business and help with exposure, it all plays it’s own part in making the process successful.

Semir, 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?

Hi all, My name is Semir Smajlovic and this is how my journey has sparked.

While attending UMSL, I continued to pursue an IT route and decided to ultimately aim for a degree in Computer Science because I had such a huge love and passion for anything computer-related and I was always eager to learn new things, which sparked me getting an internship at a public relations company in downtown St. Louis and ultimately moving over to a full-time developer position within the company in a years time. While working a full-time job and having the IT skillset, I slowly started experimenting other routes and seeing what I could do on the side to spark some business ideas, but things were running slow and I wasn’t being as creative as I should be, so this happened…

One evening, I’m looking for events in the local region and each time that I would look for events, I would keep scrolling and was never satisfied with all the events displayed, which all seemed “boring” to me, so this sparked an idea. With social media playing a huge role in 2017, I thought to myself, what can I do to enhance the experience of showcasing events that seem “cool” and saving people the time it takes for things to do? This is where the Instagram handle @saintlouisevents sparked. With having such an organic name and me having the technical IT side of being able to compile “cool” events and then schedule them for posting on Instagram – Once I started doing this, growth was slow, but once I started reaching close to 500 followers, the page blew up to 10,000 within a year and I knew I was on the right track to provide people content and save their time browsing for things to do. As of today, we have 50,000+ local followers and I have worked with 300+ business and vendors to bring them exposure to their events/businesses and I couldn’t be more proud of what the page has turned into.

With such a huge organic following, you then start to get even more creative, which sparked me to start Smajlovic Enterprises, which is a IT-based start-up in St. Louis that specializes in website development, marketing, graphics, maintenance and all IT related things because now I could combine the exposure and list of network contacts that I have built, into boosting up other routes that I am working on and succeeding in.

Moral of the story, don’t ever give up – Even if you’ve come from a war-torn country with nothing but your family and possibly $20 in their pockets, everything is achievable if you put the bad things in your life to the side and focus on the positives.

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

When building a social media following, niches are crucial. There have to be so many factors in making a social media account be validated by others and gain following. When I started out, I was able to find an account called “saintlouisevents”, keywords here, when others searched for “St. Louis”, “Saint Louis”, “Events”, etc.. the results lead them back to my account because I had the cities name in the actual username, if there was a random name such as stl1726events, the following would be completely different, the name has to be authentic. Once I started to gain some followers by posting events, I would spread the word around parks, gas stations, etc.. and before you know it, the following grew up to 10k. Once you reach 10k, the following self grows.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

One big lesson that I had to unlearn is that I needed to adopt to knowing that not everyone would want to work with me, even if I provided them services at a reasonable price. The harsh reality is that some people can’t even afford the discounted services, so you have to help them in a way where they will come back in the future, when they are able to afford services and work with you then.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://semirsmajlovic.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/semirxbih
• Other: https://instagram.com/saintlouisevents

Image Credits
Semir Smajlovic