There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve never heard of one of the fastest rising celebrities on Instagram, but I promise you that it’s not just another talentless wannabe pop star or reality TV parasite. Nope, it’s just some guy’s grandmother that has racked up more than 138,000 followers on the photo sharing site, all because people are turning to her for a positive outlook and plenty of smiles. Known as “grandmabetty33” to strangers all over the world, Betty Simpson is the 80-year old grandmother of teenager Zach Belden, who decided to start an account for this sweet lady to not only chronicle her battle with cancer, but also share the positive messages that she has learned in her lifetime.
As you can see in the duck-faced, peace sign selfie above, Grandma Betty is picking up the intricacies of social media quite well. But she also has a pretty great tutor, as Belden hasn’t left her side.
ABC US News | ABC Business News
“He loves me so much, that’s why he did it. He doesn’t want to lose me and he’s just good to me,” Simpson said of her great-grandson. “I didn’t even know he was doing this.”
She told ABC News she has “been very sick,” and almost died twice six months ago. Since then, Zach has been at her side (whenever he’s not at school), documenting short snippets of his Simpson’s everyday life in photos and short video clips and posting them to the photo-sharing site. (Via ABC News)
When ABC News told Simpson’s story on Friday, she had more than 20,000 followers, but that number has skyrocketed since then, as her dance to Pharrell’s “Happy” made a follower out of the artist himself. She even recorded a special video to thank all of her new followers when she reached 23,000.
I can’t wait to see what she does for 1 million fans, as that should be happening any day now.