Can ‘FinTok’ help get your finances in shape? Beware these pitfalls
When Corynn Fowler turned her camera around and started filming her own financial advice to post on TikTok two years ago, she didn’t have high expectations.
It began as an experiment to market her offline business, How To Adult School, which teaches followers the basics of financial literacy.
The self-taught Toronto-area creator and educator tells Global News she was “very surprised” to see the interest accumulate on her videos.
While the TikTok algorithm can be “random” at times — giving hundreds of views to some videos and hundreds of thousands, if not more, to others — Fowler says she has around 125,000 followers on the platform.
“I was blown away,” she says. “Within a few weeks of making TikTok videos, it became one of the main drivers of new people through to my business.”
Financial advice is a popular topic on TikTok, with videos grouped under the “FinTok” tag receiving 4.4 billion views according to an analysis by NerdWallet Canada. But experts who spoke to Global News say the booming popularity of the financial advice on social media comes with pitfalls.
Shannon Terrell, lead writer and spokesperson for NerdWallet Canada, says that while finance content isn’t restricted to TikTok, the platform is where “influencers tend to be gaining the traction.”
Fowler says that her content is geared towards educating her viewers about the basics of financial management that her audience might not have learned in school or otherwise gotten exposure to.
Because of that, her audience skews younger to people in their 20s and 30s, she says.
One of the videos on her account that has recorded 1.6 million views so far is an explanation of why it pays to start investing early — and how waiting can cost you.
An argument for why you
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