Cierra from Love Island USA's Instagram Has a Secret Weapon—Her Best Friend

Cosmopolitan

5 hours ago

There's an almost inconceivable amount of trust you need to have in someone to give them your Instagram password. There's an even higher amount of trust you need to have in someone to give them your Instagram password in order to manage your account while you're across the globe in Fiji, with zero access to your phone, participating in season 7 of Love Island USA. And it's the kind of trust that Cierra Ortega has in her best friend MJ Hedderman, whom she granted the honor of running her socials while she stars in arguably the summer's biggest show. Cierra tapped Phoenix-based MJ for this task during the 48 hours she had in between finding out she would be on the show and the moment she walked into the villa.
Since then, MJ's posts on Cierra's account, which range from reaction memes to impassioned takedowns of a man who's done her dirty, have gone viral for their wit and honesty. And they read as a departure from the inoffensive 'Watch Love Island USA on Peacock tonight' posts that many contestants' social media admins rely on.
MJ and Cierra, both content creators, originally met through a mutual friend four years ago and have now reached that classic stage of friendship when you help your pal's IG grow from 32k to 634k followers in four weeks. (One that I have yet to experience but would very much like to, @ all my friends.)
And MJ is taking her role incredibly seriously. She knows she isn't just posting but also managing her friend's public perception and laying the groundwork for post-villa business opportunities. These efforts all come from a place of deep love and respect for her bestie. We caught up with MJ about her approach to making posts go viral, why she doesn't regret throwing Nic shade, and the famous fans who are now following Cierra's journey.
We knew in March that she was interviewing, but our friend group has known for years that she'd be perfect for the show. The second she told us she was interviewing, we were like, 'Oh, so you're going on Love Island.' She's like, 'Girl, I literally won't know until two days before I have to leave.' Every time she met with the producers, they didn't tell her to get her hopes up. Then, literally on a Friday afternoon, she texted our group chat that she was leaving the next Monday. I knew she was going the whole time. I was like, 'Oh my god, pack your bags, pick your outfits, start buying your jewelry,' because she loves to accessorize. She's literally a walking Pinterest board. And I just think she's the best-dressed on the show ever. But I'm also so biased.
It was super casual. She had brought it up a few months before, and then a couple of days before she left, she got an email from the producers asking who was going to run her account when she was gone. And I was the first one to respond to her ask in the group chat. I'm also chronically online, so our friends were like, 'You know what? You have fun. We'll be here if you need us.' They've been very supportive. We have a group chat called 'Got a Text,' and I send them anything I think might be slightly problematic. Like, 'Hey, how do you feel about me calling Nic 'Boo Boo the Clown'?' They're like, 'Go for it!' But yeah, no one was clawing for it. On TikTok, I've been getting comments from people being like, 'I would kill to do this.' And I'm like, girl, I'm doing an unpaid internship. But I'm having such a blast, so I can't complain.
Honestly, I didn't go into it with any social strategy whatsoever. For the first post, I screenshotted some things from the Love Island Instagram and was like, 'Who do we think the hottest in the villa is?' Then my emotions got involved when I saw that Nic was treating Cierra like an option. My first thought was like, Girl, we need to hire an Etsy witch to find her real man.
It's exactly what I would text in the group chat to my friends. And then it snowballed from there. I watch each episode fully locked in, with captions and everything. Then I rewatch the episode with the captions off, and I try to find the perfect screen grabs. The way I get all these perfect photos of her is that I sit in a completely dark room so there's no reflection on my screen, and I just zoom in and take pictures. It's hard when someone's talking to get the perfect image, so I have to go back five or six times to get the perfect frame. So now my entire camera is just pictures of Cierra's face.
But I go through all of them, find the best ones, and then if any of them call to me, like she's making a funny face or something, I'm like, 'Oh, this could be a funny meme.' There was one where she was looking surprised, and I said, 'Me acting surprised when I already went through his phone' or something. There's not much strategy. It's more just the first thing that pops into my head, and whatever I would text in our group chat.
I've noticed with a lot of other islanders—because I've been checking out their accounts—there are no opinions. It's more like, 'We love our girl! Watch Love Island.' Honestly, even though I'm an influencer and it's my job to tell people to buy stuff, as a consumer, I hate being told what to do. If I'm following someone on Love Island, it's probably because I'm already watching the show and I'm already invested. So I did not feel the need to add hashtags or to tell people where to watch it because people are already doing that. And I honestly think the content has engaged better by not doing that. I'm also very opinionated, so it's been very hard for me to, like, not put my opinions in the posts. But I could be a lot more opinionated, which is exactly what I'm doing on my own TikTok.
I also wanted to create a space on Cierra's account that she would also find funny, because she has an incredible sense of humor. Before she went to the villa, the only thing she texted me was, 'Have fun. Make memes. Be silly. You can make fun of me!' I think it's working because people see how much love is going into the post. Every time I'm writing these, I'm literally pouring my heart out.
I've been a full-time influencer since 2021. So this is not necessarily easy, especially given the number of followers that she's gained in the past week—she's gained, I think, 100,000 in less than eight hours—but it helps. Like, knowing how to block certain hate words and block comments. The second I see any type of hateful comment, I take all the keywords and I put them into the hidden word option on Instagram, so then no one can comment anything terrible. The beauty of working in this industry is that you kind of become numb to it after a while. You realize that the people sending hate aren't saying that because they genuinely hate you. Maybe they do, but it's probably because they don't love themselves enough. It's definitely challenging at times, dealing with the influx of people, but it's manageable. Granted, I've been focusing 100 percent more on her Instagram than I have mine, but I know that she has so much potential for growth while in the villa, so I might as well focus on this for her for six weeks and set her up for life.
That's what I'm saying. There are a lot of people on the show, like Huda for example, who could be getting a bad edit. That happened to Cierra in the beginning, with the whole Bell-A and Nic situation. Cierra was literally getting death threats in her DMs. I feel like one way to combat that beforehand is by creating a good perception on her Instagram. Her DMs are insane. Half of them are fans; a portion are athletes. And then there's the famous people, like Julia Fox followed her.
I've been texting her updates every single day, like, 'You just hit 600k, Julia Fox just followed you, Kim Kardashian just reposted your Skims ad on her story.' [Editor's note: Cierra won't be seeing these texts until she's out of the villa because, again, she does not have her phone.] I just know she's going to freak out when she's out of the villa. Our friend Johnnie, who was on the show a couple years ago said, you really have no idea what the public thinks. That's the scariest part. But Cierra's in good hands.
What was your relationship to reality TV like before this?
I've never watched Love Island USA before. Cierra's the one who got me into reality TV. She got me into Big Brother, she's been begging me to watch Love Is Blind for years, and she forced me to watch the Vanderpump Rules finale where Ariana rips Tom a new one. And she kept pausing it to provide context.
I look at them occasionally just to see what the vibe is. But honestly, I'm booked and busy with this account. I do check them out to see where they are growth-wise. It's not a competition, but I am a very competitive person, and since it's not my account I'm very much looking at it like a business where I'm like, 'Okay, how much growth can we get in six weeks?' Especially because, when the whole Huda/Jeremiah situation was going on, Cierra wasn't getting any screen time. So I was like, This is my time to shine. If I can make posts go viral, she'll gain followers from just existing on Instagram. Granted, when she has screen time, she eats it. Everyone's like, 'She's been coached. She's media trained.' No, she is just genuinely that eloquent and witty in real life. She's a Libra.
If they do end up together, I will own it! I'm not deleting any of the posts—I called him Boo Boo the Clown for a reason. I will stick to my guns. But I don't think he's a bad guy. I'm looking at it from a best friend's perspective, not from objectively watching the show. When I see her crying about someone who can't commit, it literally makes me see red. But in the context of the show, I do think they are a good couple. They both have weird interests. I just think he needs to get his head screwed on straight and realize the gorgeous goddess that he has in front of him. But I have to remind myself, it is just a show.