How Ezra Sosa’s Unique Style is Revolutionizing ‘Dancing with the Stars’ trucc

The TikTok and competition-TV star pumped out behind-the-scenes content during the show’s most recent season, which broke viewership and voting engagement records.

In the weeks leading up to the premiere of Season 33 of Dancing with the Stars last September, Anna Delvey’s casting set the internet aflame.

While the fake heiress and convicted felon’s controversial dancing debut drummed up fresh interest in the decades-old show at the season’s start, it may have been her pro partner’s internet savvy that helped carry engagement in the season to record-breaking levels.

That pro partner is Ezra Sosa, a 24-year-old ballroom dancer that joined the DWTS cast as a troupe member in 2021 before being promoted to a pro dancer partnered with contestants in 2024. Delvey was his first ever celebrity partner, and while there was great fanfare, it was short-lived: the duo was the first pair to be eliminated. But their short run gave way to a long tail of viral moments on both TV and phone screens, and even after the pair was voted out, Sosa’s TikTok account became a go-to destination for newer fans to engage with the show.

Now between seasons, Sosa is managing a budding personal brand while still representing DWTS’s newly modernized image—a perception that he says is a result of both his work on social and the show’s clever casting efforts.

“They’re like, ‘Okay, we have a convicted felon. Okay, let’s give her to the twink who has a good social media presence. Let’s go. Let’s make the most out of this,’” Sosa told Marketing Brew. “What a lot of the pros really started to get into this season was bringing that awareness to the show. We brought people to the show, but they stayed to watch the show. It came hand in hand. If the show wasn’t good, we wouldn’t have the fan base.”

Social with the stars

Before DWTS’s most recent season, Sosa had about 70,000 TikTok followers and 90,000 Instagram followers. Today, those numbers have jumped to about 571,000 and 272,000, respectively, with an average engagement rate of 100 million views per month, a result that he credited to strategic posting, he said.

For those previously unaware of him or his role on the show, Sosa might have popped up on feeds for a clip filmed after his and Delvey’s elimination, where she was asked what she learned from her experience on the show. Delvey deadpanned “nothing” —and a meme was born instantly. Sosa took the moment and ran with it: he got a tattoo of the word “nothing”; created a custom TikTok sound mashing up Delvey’s line delivery with the chorus of Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing,” and incorporated the moment into several of Delvey’s appearances in behind-the-scenes footage.

Beng in on the joke is key to his social media presence, he said, and it’s something that he believes sets him apart and helped lay the groundwork for how the show puts social media to use.

“When I joined the show, I was posting TikToks, and [the other pros were] like, ‘We don’t want to do TikTok,’ so I’m like, ‘Wait a couple years. Just give it a little bit. [The show is] going to get into it, I promise you,” he said. “And now we’re all doing TikToks.”

Sosa’s posts gave fans access to their favorite stars beyond what aired on TV, and later in the season, it became more official when he was tasked with cohosting a DWTS-official TikTok Live during the Instant Dance Challenge’s ad breaks. The challenge involved the remaining couples coming up with an entire routine in the minutes between the live broadcast, and the TikTok Live showed fans more of the process against the backdrop of Sosa’s commentary.

It wasn’t the first time DWTS had done a livestream, but Sosa said previous versions had been on YouTube. The TikTok version, which Sosa described as “wildly successful,” reassured him that his online activity was not only approved, but encouraged.

“I knew what I was posting was not the norm,” he said. “So when they told me that, I was like, ‘Wait, maybe they’re appreciating my social media presence.’”

The show has plenty else to appreciate. During Season 33, fan voting records were broken several times over, peaking at 32 million votes during the finale, and 6.4 million people tuned in to watch the finale, the show’s highest Live+Same Day viewership since 2020. Much of that growth was in the 18–49 demographic, where viewership was up 70% YoY, per Deadline.

Into the galaxy
Where does Sosa go from here? He’s gearing up for Season 34, which will premiere in September and includes conservationist Robert Irwin and social media star Alix Earle among the celebrity dance partners. Before then, he is balancing the show’s recent live tour, making appearances during Pride, and bolstering his social presence that’s increasingly featured brand deals. (Recent collabs include Skittles, beauty brand Sol de Janeiro, juice brand Naked, and allergy medicine Allegra.)

Even with a wide range of partnerships, Sosa says he is strategic about how and when he posts brand deals, and he prides himself on being easy to work with.

“I’ll never double-post a brand deal,” he said. “I have to make sure that it’s sandwiched in between a video that I know will go viral, because my job, when I’m getting these brand deals, [is] to make sure that I can get it to as many people as possible.”

Sosa said he knows that as he grows his personal brand, people engage most with content related to DWTS, which means he is tasked with playing the dual roles of influencer and reality TV star. That delineation can be blurry, he said, but he also views it as giving him a bit of an edge.

“We are very recognizable people, but we’re not, like, A-list,” he said. “I’m not like, freaking Jay-Z up in this. I’m just shaking my booty cheeks on national television.”