From TikTok to Real Money: How Young Ghanaians Are Turning Social Media Into Businesses

There's a particular kind of pride in watching someone you went to school with, someone who was just messing around with a phone camera a few years ago, show up on your timeline with a brand deal, or their own product, or a car they clearly didn't have last year. It happens often enough in Ghana now that it's stopped being a novelty. It's a career path.

What's changed isn't that young Ghanaians are funny, stylish, or good cooks; they always were. What's changed is that a phone and a following are now enough to build something real on. Mobile money makes it easy to get paid. Data, while not cheap, is affordable enough to post daily. And a young population, more than half the country is under 25, spends its time exactly where these businesses are being built.

Em News looked at four different paths young Ghanaians have taken from content to income: a chef who cooked her way from Kumasi to a stage in Cannes, a set of twins who turned viral filters and comedy into a real business, a beauty creator who built a haircare brand out of GH₵50, and the quieter, less glamorous hustle of traders who use TikTok simply to move stock.

Chef Abby's Ghanaian food, told well enough to travel

Abena Amoakoaa Sintim-Aboagye didn't train as a chef. Her academic background is in construction management, and she's described herself, only half-jokingly, as an engineer by profession and a cook by passion. That gap between what she studied and what made her famous is part of what makes her story interesting.

Under the name Chef Abbys, she started posting short, culturally rooted videos of Ghanaian cooking- jollof, waakye, kenkey, banku and built an audience that now runs well into the millions across TikTok and YouTube. The recognition followed the audience, not the other way round. In 2025, TIME named her to its list of the 100 most influential creators globally, describing her as an "African food tourist" for the way she frames traditional dishes as culture as much as cuisine. That same year, TikTok flew her to France for the Cannes Lions festival, where she met the platform's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, a moment she later called life-changing.

She's also used the platform for more than content. During a period of public protest around illegal mining in Ghana, she offered free food to demonstrators taking part in the #StopGalamseyNow movement, and more recently led a 25-day culinary tour across all twelve of Ghana's regions during the country's Heritage Month. For Chef Abbys, the business side of content creation, brand partnerships, sponsored appearances, and the commercial weight that comes with millions of views, seems to have arrived as a consequence of doing the storytelling well, consistently, for years.

The Mitch Brothers: from Snapchat filters to a fragrance line

Padmond Annor and his twin brother Padmond Annor Jr;  known online as Nana Mitch and Schardo Mitch, grew up in Sefwi Wiawso before their family's story took them through school in Kumasi and Tema. Their path into content creation started in an unlikely place: Snapchat lenses.

Nana Mitch taught himself lens design through online workshops around 2019, frustrated that Ghana wasn't well represented on the app. His first filter, a beauty lens called "Ahuofe", Twi for "beauty", pulled in millions of views and made him the first Ghanaian Snapchat lens creator of note. He went on to design custom lenses for African celebrities including Sister Derby, Bobrisky and Zlatan, and even built one for Ghana's then-president, Nana Akufo-Addo. His twin, Schardo Mitch, built a parallel career as a lifestyle influencer and film director, picking up ambassadorial deals with brands like Jazzy Burger, CompuGhana and Duffy's Health & Beauty along the way.

What's notable is what the brothers did once the audience was there: rather than stopping at sponsored posts, they launched their own fragrance brand, Relief by MB, turning years of built-up trust with their followers into an actual product. They've also folded their platform into Smile4mation, a philanthropic project, which has helped earn them nominations at Ghana's Forty Under 40 Awards. Between the two of them, they've built the kind of following, several hundred thousand strong, that makes brands come looking for them, not the other way round.

Ama Burland: GH₵50, ten bottles, and a haircare brand

If there's one story here that captures how small the starting point can be, it's Ama Burland's. Also known online as Princess Burland, she was already one of Ghana's established digital creators when she started experimenting with a hair oil for her own personal use, nothing commercial about it at first.

She shared the recipe on her YouTube channel, and when fans said they couldn't easily source the ingredients themselves, she did something simple: she bottled it. Ten bottles, funded with GH₵50. It sold out almost immediately. That small test became Diya Organics, now an Ayurvedic-inspired haircare brand with its own physical space, Diya's Studio, alongside her continued work as a creator. Her online following, over a million across platforms, has since attracted partnerships with Samsung, Spotify, MAC Cosmetics and Coca-Cola, including an invitation-only appearance at Coca-Cola's FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour experience in Abidjan.

Her story is probably the cleanest example of what people mean when they talk about turning a following into a business. She didn't launch a product and then look for an audience. She had the audience's trust first, tested something small against it, and scaled only once it proved itself.

The everyday reseller: Kantamanto on a phone screen

Beneath the creators with six and seven-figure followings is a much larger, far less visible layer of Ghana's social media economy, traders who aren't trying to go viral at all, just trying to sell what they've already bought. Thelma Yeboah, a university graduate who turned to reselling secondhand clothing after struggling to find formal work, is one example of a pattern that's become common in Accra. Twice a week, on Kantamanto's busiest trading days, she sources items from the market, then photographs and posts them for buyers who've largely stopped showing up to browse in person.

It's the same cycle playing out across Accra's boutiques, chop bars and car lots: film it, post it, close the sale in the comments or a direct message. A recent analysis in Pulse Ghana put a name to the gap many of these sellers still struggle with: Ghanaian businesses are good at getting attention on TikTok, but the moment a customer has to move to WhatsApp to actually buy something, a lot of that momentum gets lost. The traders who've figured out how to close that gap quickly are quietly building real businesses. The ones who haven't are left with views and not much else.

What actually ties these stories together

Four very different paths, food, comedy and philanthropy, beauty and product, resale, and yet none of them started with a business plan. They started with someone posting consistently, in public, for long enough that an audience formed around them. The money came after, and in most cases, well after.

That's probably the least glamorous but most useful thing a young Ghanaian watching from the sidelines could take from any of this: virality is not a strategy. Showing up, week after week, long enough for strangers to start trusting you, is.