The best cleaning tips are no longer available from grandma

Clean the bathroom with me, tidy up the living room in 15 minutes and try this new trick to get the grout sparkling white. On Tiktok alone, there are more than four million videos with these and similar sayings under the hashtag #cleantok. Lea de Bruijn has also been sharing cleaning and household tips on Tiktok for about a year.

“People enjoy watching these videos,” says the 25-year-old from the Ruhr region. “The videos also motivate them to clean up when they don’t feel like it.” The followers build trust in the influencers. “When they recommend something, the followers usually believe that the product is good or that the trick works.”

Four-digit sums per video

Her account has more than 110,000 followers on Tiktok and around 28,000 on Instagram. In her niche, the social media personalities are also called cleanfluencers. The English word “clean” means clean.

De Bruijn has turned her passion, cleaning, into her profession. The influencer says she works about eight to ten hours on a video – and gets paid four-figure sums for it. “I’m always working in different collaborations and I get two to three inquiries a day,” says the 25-year-old. “There are small companies, but also well-known ones.” Her plan: “Soon I will be presenting and selling my own cleaning products.”

Cleaning tips in high demand on the Internet

In her videos, De Bruijn recommends, for example, putting fabric softener on a cloth and wiping it over surfaces that are prone to dust, as this prevents the dust from settling there. She also shows how she cleans her windows with shampoo – without leaving streaks. The cleanfluencer often tests new cleaning products such as soaps, sponges or cloths, shows which products can be used to deep clean pillows, for example, or how she regularly wipes the stairwell of her apartment building.

“In the past, people would traditionally ask their grandmother or mother for home remedies, but now many people look for them on the Internet and especially on social media,” says Arne Westermann, Professor of Marketing and Communication at the International School of Management (ISM).

Besides cleaning, there are countless other niches on social networks, each with their own influencers. People show how they do their makeup, how they cook, how they travel, what they wear, how they equip their bike, what books they read and much more.

Companies advertise

It’s no wonder that these topic bubbles are not only of interest to private individuals. “Companies look at what’s trending and how they can jump on the bandwagon with their products,” says marketing expert Westermann. This doesn’t necessarily only happen via company accounts. For influencers like Lea de Bruijn, this could be a lucrative business.

According to the company, the influencer campaigns of the cleaning division Vileda of the Freudenberg Group, based in Weinheim, were doubled in 2024 compared to the previous year, and there are plans to expand them further. Influencer collaborations have also steadily increased at the cleaning equipment manufacturer Kärcher, which has its headquarters in Winnenden, Baden-Württemberg. The household goods manufacturer Leifheit has also recorded a significant increase in collaboration with so-called cleanfluencers. The number of collaborations is therefore in the low to mid double-digit range.

Not an unproblematic trend

In addition to the economic appeal, psychologist Brigitte Bösenkopf also sees several problems with cleaning videos. “It would be best if the person jumped up straight away after watching such a video and used the motivation to tidy up,” she says. “But it is in the nature of social networks that they usually captivate users and their own initiative falls by the wayside.” Comparing your own uncleaned apartment with those in the videos is tricky and leads to frustration: “There are many perfectionists on social networks who clean their apartments with an almost clinically noticeable level of cleanliness,” explains Bösenkopf.

The fact that many of the cleaning videos are filmed and published by women is also problematic: “This can reinforce traditional gender roles,” says Bösenkopf. It’s different with cooking videos: “Here you can see from the videos that cooking is no longer just a ‘women’s job’.” In reality, many men also clean their homes, but they post fewer videos on social networks.