In preparation for any of his videos, Folagade Banks ties a headdress. Sometimes it’s a colourful silk bonnet. Sometimes he wears a dress, other times dons just a robe.
In one scene where he recreates an experience with the head nurse at a general hospital, he wears a tiny white dress and headpiece reminiscent of nurses in the early aught. Then he becomes Mama Adeola.
Who is Mama Adeola?
Mama Adeola is a personality that he created a few years ago, just months shy of the coronavirus lockdown, but has gone on to become something of an Instagram sensation. She is loud, feisty, a braggart and does not suffer fools.
When he started posting videos of himself on Instagram, he didn’t start sharing Mama Adeola with his followers – he now has 180K of them. He went through the highly commercially successful route of cultural criticism, or “bants” as they call it, on the fast streets of Instagram, staring dead-faced into the camera as he dishes out the latest problems facing Nigerians.
“I’ve always had the idea of creating content around, you know, my personal experience with my mom, my friend’s mom,” Folagade Banks told Technetx recently. “You know, it felt like ‘Would I even be able to do this?’ Because that will require me to actually dramatise them. I thought I wasn’t really good at doing those stuff. It took me like a month before I summoned all the courage to do that content,” he said.
Then he posted the first one, a video on how mothers send long broadcast messages predicting doom on anything from the dangers of leaving the air conditioners turned on to the problems of wearing a headset, a particular favourite of Nigerian mothers. It went viral.
“People loved it,” he said. “I told myself this is it. This is what God wants me to put on people’s tables. And so I just stuck to it.”
How Folagade Banks got his following
He was able to leverage his already viable bant content and scale up, growing his community across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, getting reported on other blogs.
“It didn’t take a month from when I started before I started seeing myself on blogs; Kratz TV. They were reposting my content just after like five videos,” he said.
But he didn’t even set out to dominate social media platforms per se. He was content with his Instagram success until fans demanded his presence across other platforms. For one, they wanted to use his voiceovers for their lipsync videos.
“I didn’t go to TikTok until I knew I had a stand. I had a real audience on Instagram. So it was my followers that told me ‘We need you on TikTok. We want to make use of your videos, the sound and everything.”
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But even now that he has 196k followers on TikTok, he says Instagram remains a priority. In part because brands pay content creators on Instagram more for influencing. But also, on Instagram, he has a real community there. His fans come back to his content, leaving comments which can be greatly encouraging.
“My Instagram has been my priority. You know anybody can have a viral content on TikTok. But Instagram is like a community of people. On Instagram you can’t escape having an audience, having a community,” he said.
But even in this content economy and trailing on social media, he says that creators don’t need to become everything for everyone but focus on people interested in their content.
“I always tell people that ‘you don’t need to appeal to everybody.’ If it’s just two people that you can get, I’m telling you, there are thousands of them that you can get. Not the people that will tell you ‘I can’t relate to this content. It’s not even funny. Those people are not your market.”
But he wasn’t always a big influencer, with 2.9 million likes on TikTok. He has not forgotten his days of humble beginnings when a meagre 200 likes meant the world.
“I remembered the days when if I saw 200 likes I’ll be so happy. I’ve always been contented with whatever I have, so at that moment, I was happy and the community kept getting bigger and larger.”
Mama Adeola of p[physically tasking, demanding him to raise his voice, and be energetic and extroverted. Does he ever tone it down?
“If I want to be quiet I won’t be outside. So for me to step out that means I’m ready for anything that comes with it,” he said.
Recently he was at the Gangs of Lagos movie premier, where he ran into the famed event planner Funke Bucknor, a fan. In his early days building Mama Adeola, he said she was one of his supporters. But he had not met her before. He giggled and said what can best be described as an electric hello. It looked like he had met a long-lost friend more than a stranger.
“I’d not really chatted with her. We’d not talked. But that’s the way I am. If I like you I’m coming to you. And I’ll tell you I like what you’re doing. She was directly opposite me and I just went to meet her and said ‘Mama Funke Bucknor,’ and she was like ‘You know me?'”
His advice for introverts? “Don’t be scared. Don’t be shy. Walk up to them if they are people that really inspire you, that you really like. That is how you have to be.”
About Gangs of Lagos, a fan of the director Jade Oshiberu, Folagade Banks said the story was “on point.”
Currently, he is working on a talk show for his YouTube page. “You will be seeing that soon,” he said.
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