How I started ‘Gist with Smallie’ during lockdown – Media influencer, Smallie

Nigerian social media influencer, Abdulsalam Idris popularly known as Smallie on Twitter has narrated how he took advantage of the COVID-19 lockdown period to compile trending gists.

Many of Smallie’s followers refer to him as “CNN” due to how well he describes popular trends. Many Twitter users visit his page to keep them abreast of all the details of the latest trends after a long day.

According to him, he was not thinking of becoming an influencer when it all started as he said it was not “planned” but born out of his love for Twitter.

In his words, “It wasn’t planned. I can’t say something inspired me to start doing it, it was just in the heat of the moment but with time, it became intentional.

“It was on a very busy day on the timeline with many stories and gist that many people couldn’t cover at that time, so I decided to put those gists in a thread,” he disclosed.

The undergraduate student of Mechanical Engineering in Ado Bayero Kano further said he received a lot of words of encouragements from social media users which pushed him to continue with the trend.

“A lot of people were grateful because I saved them the stress of searching for gist everywhere on the timeline and they enjoyed it because I infused touches of humor in the gists.

People also encouraged me to continue because it was lockdown period and many gists will still come to the timeline,” he stated.

“So I was basically the lockdown gist reporter,” he added.

The undergraduate student of Mechanical Engineering in Ado Bayero Kano, recently reached a milestone of over 500,000 followership on Twitter due to his consistency in content creation which attracted massive engagement as his page, “Gist with Smallie” became a go-to place where people search for events and recent happenings.