Bridget Chant and her pet parrot Hamlet amass 4.3 million followers on TikTok

A Toowoomba woman and her pet parrot Hamlet are now among Australia’s biggest social media superstars, with 4.3 million followers on TikTok.

In a time when so many influencers are spending heaps of time and resources to create beautifully curated posts, Toowoomba’s Bridget Chant has beaten household names like Celeste Barber and Abbie Chatfield in a world-first list measuring the true impact of social media content creators.

Ms Chant, a 25-year-old retail worker from Toowoomba, started posting videos with her pet indian ringback parrot Hamlet at the start of the pandemic to keep herself entertained, and has now become a social media star.

The videos of her real-life interactions with talkative Hamlet (named after the Shakespearean prince) now have a massive 4.3 million followers on TikTok alone, and she has made the top 20 of theoz.com.au’s Influence Index.

Bridget Chant with four-year-old indian ringback parrot Hamlet. Picture: David Martinelli

Originally from the Sunshine Coast, Ms Chant moved to the Darling Downs for her performing arts studies, and adopted Hamlet about four years ago when he was just a few weeks old, to help with her anxiety.

“What I like about social media is the good things, that’s what I’m in it for,” she said.

“I started captioning what I thought Hamlet was saying and gave him a personality, and it’s great that so many people enjoy it.”

Over a fifth of influencers on the index are from Queensland, including the No.1, Sarah Magusara, a 20-year-old Brisbane woman who posts mostly content with her young daughter. She boasts nearly 18 million followers on TikTok, 1.2 million on Instagram and 367,000 YouTube subscribers, and has committed to content creation full time.

The Influence Index is available here.