We all have had a moment when we were uncertain about what our future career will look like. Some of us stick to the profession we are in, whereas some of us take a slightly different path. But for Santosh Sapkota, it was not just a slight adjustment but a total change of career path. 

Sapkota, now 24, has been working as a social media manager for several well-known faces in Nepal and India. But his initial interest was completely opposite to what he was doing now; digital entrepreneurship. 

Born in Parbat, Sapkota was moved to his aunt’s house in Rupandehi at the age of three to ensure his better schooling. “At that time, Maoists were bombing every private school in my village. For safety and education, I was sent to Rupandehi,” he tells me. 

He completed his schooling and moved to Bangalore, India to receive a diploma in mechanical engineering in 2013. Little did he know that his career would totally change. 

Completing the diploma in 2015, Sapkota worked for 2 years in Bangalore as a service supervisor in Sri Manjunatha Pipes and returned to Nepal in 2018. In Nepal, he got his hands on a job as a service advisor in one of the companies of Agni Group, namely Agni Motoinc Pvt. Ltd.

But things took a different route in 2017, when he became an admin of the Facebook fan page for Arujn Sapkota, his cousin who had started his journey as a Nepali folk singer. He was unable to complete his engineering studies due to some family and financial issues. Nevertheless, he had not lost his hope. 

Although unable to fulfill his initial goals, Sapkota, a folk song lover and cricket enthusiast, was adapting to his new role as a social media manager. But that journey wasn’t easy for him either. “I faced a lot of issues within the fan page, with no clue on how to solve it,” he says. Slowly but surely, he did get a handle on those issues, and the page started getting responses. He started getting better at what he was doing, which was clearly seen on the page he was handling. “The fan page started getting more of an audience, because of which my brother started getting a lot of inquiries on who was handling the page,” he tells me. 

His exposure grew when people started finding out that he was behind the management of the fan page, and various celebrities started offering him jobs to handle their social media. Celebrities faced a lot of issues, like accounts and pages getting hacked, and some were facing problems while publishing their posts, for which they started seeking Sapkota’s help. 

“I think it was the realization that well-known people were looking for my help, that boosted my motivation to take this work as a career,” says Sapkota. 

It was only in 2019 that Sapkota started collaborating with other celebrities and handling their social media. One major attraction for him in this job was the way the pages worked. “It excites me to see followers increase, to communicate with many people, and most of all, being able to convey messages to a large group of audiences,” he tells me. 

Although quite interesting, he says that the task is difficult, especially in Nepal. “Here, it is difficult to make payments to boost the posts, properly monetize the accounts, and also Nepal is not eligible for page monetization,” he says. Along with that, the job does not have any working hours. Sapkota needs to be available at any time of the day, as there is no surety on when his clients might need him to solve a problem in their account. “Accounts might get hacked at 1 am. We never know,” he says. And sometimes, it might take hours to solve such problems, giving him no guarantee of how much time he will have to invest. 

Currently, Sapkota handles 15 social medias in total, of six celebrities, among which some of them are Saigrace Pokharel (Nepali storyteller), Kushal Bhurtel (Nepali cricketer), and Shirish Devkota (Nepali singer). In the past, he has managed social handles of known personalities like Maheshwar Jung Gahatraj (Sports Minister of Nepal), and Mujahid Alam (an Indian politician). 

He believes that there are a lot of opportunities for youths in the digital world. “There are a lot of areas to explore in digital and social media, you just have to find the right path for yourself,” he says. 

In the case of Sapkota, he does not see himself leaving this job anytime soon. “I love what I do. As long as people face problems with social media, you will definitely see me around trying to solve those problems,” he says with a satisfaction in his voice.