By Kalena Reynolds | Staff Writer
For Denton seniors Ana and Edith Alvarez, creating content and posting on social media hasn’t always come naturally. However, after amassing 6.7 million views on one of their Instagram reels, their lives as Baylor students began to change.
Both pre-medicine, the twins never planned on going viral. But after a mission trip, they decided they wanted to start documenting their lives and posting on social media.
“Once the summer was over and the mission trip was done, we were like, ‘OK, let’s transition it over to studying [content],’” Ana said. “So that’s what we’re doing right now.”
Prior to posting studying content, the twins started a book account to share their favorite reading content while keeping their personal lives hidden.
“Originally, this account was mainly about us talking about books,” Ana said. “It was super private, and we didn’t want to reveal ourselves. We didn’t even have our names associated with the account, just because we were so nervous putting ourselves out there.”
The twins said they hope to utilize their platform to motivate and inspire other pre-med students.
“We also wanted to use this account to motivate others, especially in the pre-med community and those other rigorous career pathways,” Edith said. “It can be very lonely and unmotivated, so we wanted to encourage other students who feel more motivated and inspired to keep going on this very long, daunting journey. And a lot of students at Baylor have reached out telling us that this content has motivated them and inspired them, and honestly, it encourages us to keep going and keep posting about our life here at Baylor and our pre-med life in general.”
During their journey at Baylor, the twins took a physics course that they found especially hard. After some self-reflection, they decided to reevaluate the way they were approaching the course and share their tips in an Instagram reel — the one that ended up gaining 6.7 million views.
“I posted that video, and then it took maybe two days before it started to increase exponentially,” Edith said. “I remember when we first hit the 100,000 view count, I was like, ‘There’s no way it’s going to keep going.’ And then it hit 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, and kept growing; 6.7 million is where it stopped, but it’s still getting likes and comments today.”
Because of the twins’ viral content, multiple companies have since approached them for paid collaborations.
“We started receiving paid collaborations from companies that wanted us to promote their products, whether that was studying products, skincare brands or MCAT prep materials,” Ana said. “And so it’s been truly motivating and a life-changing moment.”
Although Ana and Edith have currently gained almost 10,000 followers on Instagram, they went into content creation with limited knowledge and learned by asking questions and researching.
“As soon as we started picking up some followers and some engagement, we started learning and asking, ‘What are the things that they liked?'” Ana said. “By doing that, we asked poll questions in our stories just to see what kind of content they would like to see, just because it’s been really crazy having this amount of followers just fall all of a sudden.”
