LEE COUNTY, Fla. — Imagine you’re scrolling on your ‘For You’ page on TikTok, and you see a video set in Southwest Florida. Now that FGCU men’s basketball player Brandon Dwyer has risen to internet fame, it’s pretty likely.
“I don’t know if I’d classify myself as being famous,” Dwyer laughed. “It’s still really all new to me. It’s happened so quickly all within the past year.”
In the summer of 2022, Brandon moved to Fort Myers from the northeast.
He said there were just so many amazing things happening down here that he wanted to share with his family and friends. So he started making “point of view” videos showing a day in the life of an FGCU basketball player.
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“I think my first video got a couple thousand views, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, a couple thousand views! That’s unreal.’ I couldn’t believe it,” Dwyer said.
The Delaware native started posting more and more and switched up his content.
He’s gone from a couple thousand followers…to nearly one million between TikTok and Instagram.
“So I make pretty much relatable basketball stuff. I’ve been in all aspects of basketball,” Dwyer explained. “So I just kind of think back through my current time as playing basketball and my past in basketball and just try to make relatable videos so people watch like ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going through this’ or ‘Oh, I went through this.”
Clearly, it’s working!
“It’s just kind of spiraled to what it is today. It’s really cool going over to away games, getting recognized by fans, doing autographs, taking pictures post-game, and having people come to the game just because they say they want to meet me. All because of just the content I make, which is wild to me. It’s been a really, really fun experience,” Dwyer said.
Some of his most successful videos are the ones where he jokes about riding the bench and not scoring yet as an Eagle. He even sells shirts that say “Road to One Point.”
With supporters always comes haters, but he’s learned how to deal with that.
“I really try to pride myself on just being myself, just having fun. I like to make fun of myself because I get a lot of hate comments, and I get a lot of positive comments,” Dwyer said. “You have no idea the amount of videos from comments, especially mean comments, I’ve turned into content that ends up doing well. So I think it’s just all about your mindset with that.”
Business Success
And with content comes sponsorships.
Being a social media star is a lot of work. He posts on average three times per day per social media platform.
But it’s snowballed into an opportunity to profit off of it. Brandon now has an agent and several NIL deals with big companies, like Sunny D and G Fuel, turning his fun hobby into a business.
“I think anybody can do it. Because I came from no social media background. I had no idea what I was doing. I just started doing it. And I just learned, you know, as I went over the past year and a couple of months, just how the algorithm works,” he said.
So if you want to go from “Zero to Hero,” as Dwyer calls it, he says the biggest thing is to be genuine.
“Just be yourself because the odds are somebody else out there is going to enjoy the same stuff you do,” Dwyer said.