Anna McNulty demonstrating her impressive flexibility (Credit: Anna McNulty)
If you want to improve your flexibility, a Grand Bay content creator can help you extend your reach across multiple media platforms.
Eighteen-year old Anna McNulty creates flexibility routines, workouts, acrobatic tutorials and lifestyle videos which she posts on Instagram, TikTok and her central platform, YouTube. She discovered just how flexible she was when she began cheerleading eight years ago, which also led her to teach herself contortion.
“I don’t practice for a specific amount of time every day, I’m not practicing for hours on end,” said McNulty. “My hardest flexibility skill is where I do over splits, but I do it on a wall all the way to the ground. Not very many people can do that one.”
Her videos have amassed 1.65 million YouTube subscribers, 4.6 million TikTok subscribers and 733,000 Instagram followers. McNulty began creating content on Instagram in 2015 and created her YouTube channel in 2016 to make long-form videos, which weren’t available on Instagram at the time.
“I never pictured myself getting this many followers and subscribers when I first started, for sure,” she said. “I remember when I first got 10,000 followers on Instagram, I was so excited to have that many people, it’s kind of crazy.”
McNulty collaborates with many different brands, such as fitness apparel brand Gymshark and hair care brand Function of Beauty. She also created products last year with jewelry brand Rhythm Jewelry and Rose Fitness Apparel.
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- Anna McNulty flexibility photos (Credit: Anna McNulty)
“I don’t really like the word ‘influencer’ because I don’t really consider like what I do just influencing people,” she said. “I’d title myself as just a video creator and a YouTuber because I mainly try to share entertaining or helpful content. I don’t really try to sell people stuff all the time.”
When shooting a video, McNulty thinks about what kind of video she wants to do and which platform it will be posted on.
“I would say the main difference is just the kind of content I’m posting,” she said. “YouTube is obviously longer videos, and then TikTok is more like really quick things that get people’s attention, and then Instagram is more photos.”
“If it’s a beginner routine or an advanced routine, I plan out all the stretches that I’m going to do,” she said, adding that challenge or recreation videos take more time to plan. McNulty shoots and edits her videos herself, with her mother and sister helping especially when creating outdoor videos.
Anna McNulty (Credit Anna McNulty)
This summer, she went back and forth between video styles, doing a stretch challenge every two weeks and a lifestyle video on alternate weeks.
“It depends on what’s trending at the moment and what I feel like doing, like the viral TikTok thing was trending at the time so I did a video on that,” she said.
The pandemic led people to consume more content online and on social media, resulting in an uptick in many content creators’ views and subscribers. McNulty noted her platform views skyrocketed and grew faster than they ever have, gaining 100,000 YouTube subscribers in one month during the lockdown.
“It definitely helped my social channels because everyone was at home looking for stretch routines and stuff they can do at home,” she added.
The dearth of content creators doing flexibility and stretch routines on social media means McNulty’s videos stand out. “A lot of people found my channel through those, so I definitely keep making more of them,” she said.
McNulty is taking a gap year from university, which was her original plan before COVID-19, to focus fully on her social media and content. “I’m seeing what I can do with it because it’s been going really well,” she said. “I definitely want to keep growing my platforms and seeing what I can do and I have some exciting content that I’m looking forward to.”
