Social media’s 70-and-up ‘grandfluencers’ are debunking aging myths

Joan MacDonald’s health was in a shambles at age 71. She was overweight and on numerous medications, contending with high cholesterol, high blood pressure and kidney trouble.

Her daughter, a fitness coach, warned that she’d wind up an invalid if she didn’t turn things around. She did, hitting the gym for the first time and learning to balance her diet with the help of a brand-new tool, an iPhone.

Now 75, MacDonald is a hype beast for health with a bodybuilder’s physique and 1.4 million loyal followers on Instagram.

She’s among a growing number of “grandfluencers,” folks 70 and older who have amassed substantial followings on social media with the help of decades-younger fans.

“It’s so rare to find someone her age being able to do all these things,” said one of her admirers, 18-year-old Marianne Zapata of Larchmont, N.Y. “It’s just such a positive thing to even think about.”

Both aspirational and inspirational, older influencers are turning their digital platforms into gold.

MacDonald has paid partnerships with the sportswear and supplement brand Women’s Best and the stress-busting device Sensate. And she just launched her own health and fitness app not so many years after learning how to use digital technology herself.

On TikTok, four friends who go by @oldgays — the youngest is 65 — have 2.2 million followers, including Rihanna. They have an endorsement deal with Grindr as they delight fans with their clueless answers to pop culture questions.

Others focus on beauty and style, setting up Amazon closets with their go-to looks and putting on makeup tutorials live. Lagetta Wayne, at 78, has teens asking her to be their grandmother as she tends to her vegetables and cooks them up in Suisun City, Calif., as @msgrandmasgarden on TikTok.

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Wayne, with 130,500 followers amassed since joining in June 2020, owes her social media success to a teenage granddaughter. Her very first video, a garden tour, clocked 37,600 likes.

“One day my garden was very pretty, and I got all excited about that, and I asked her if she would take some pictures of me,” Wayne recalled. “She said she was going to put me on TikTok, and I said, ‘Well, what is TikTok?’ I had never heard of it.”

Most people ages 50 and older use technology to stay connected to friends and family, according to a 2019 survey by AARP. But less than half use social media daily for that purpose, relying on Facebook above other platforms.

Just 37% of those 70 and older used social media daily in 2019, the research showed. Since the coronavirus struck, older creators have expanded their horizons beyond Facebook, often driven by the growing number of feeds by people their own age, said Alison Bryant, senior vice president for AARP.

In the California desert town of Cathedral City, Jessay Martin is the second-youngest of the Old Gays, at 68.

“I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life relaxing pretty much, and I do, but this is picking up more for us. I had a very structured week where Monday I worked the food bank at the senior center, Tuesday and Friday I did yoga for an hour and a half, Wednesday I was on the front desk at the senior center. I was just sort of floating by, not being social, not putting myself out there in the gay community. And, boy, has the Old Gays changed that,” Martin said.

Like MacDonald, they do a lot of myth busting about what’s possible in life’s sixth, seventh and eighth decades.

“They’re showing that anybody can do these things, that you don’t have to be afraid of aging. The 20- and 30-somethings don’t often think about that,” Bryant said. “The authenticity that we’re seeing in some of these older influencers is really refreshing. That’s part of the complexity of their narratives. They’re bringing other parts of their lives to it. They’re grandparents and great-grandparents and spouses. They’re more comfortable in their own skins.”

Sandra Sallin, a blogger and artist, has slowly built her following to 25,300 on Instagram. Her reach recently extended to British Olympic diving gold medalist Tom Daley, who raved about her mother’s cheesecake recipe after his coach spotted it online and made it for her athletes and staff. Sallin, a lover of lipstick who focuses on cooking and beauty, also shares photos from her past and other adventures, such as her turn last year in a vintage Spitfire high above the White Cliffs of Dover.

At 69, Toby Bloomberg in Atlanta is a Sallin supporter. She discovered Sallin after watching her compete on the short-lived Food Network show “Clash of the Grandmas.”

“She talks a lot about aging. That’s quite an unusual phenomenon on social media, which is obviously dominated by people far younger than we are,” Bloomberg said.

Aging, in fact, is what drew Sallin to social media.

“I wanted to expand my world. I felt that I was older, that my world was shrinking. People were moving, people were ill,” she said. “So I started my blog because I wanted to reach out. After that, I heard about this thing called Instagram.

“I really stumbled my way in. I’m shocked because most people who follow me are 30 and 40 years younger. But there are people who are older, who have kind of given up and say, ‘You know, I’m going to start wearing lipstick.’”