How Giulia Paié Pinto ’23 Became an Accidental Social Media Influencer

Giulia Paié Pinto ’23 wasn’t expecting much when she began posting videos on TikTok to help her stay connected to SUA during the pandemic. After a video she made about her experience as an international student from Brazil went viral—about three million people viewed the one-minute post—she was on her way to becoming a social media influencer.

Since that unexpected breakthrough, Paié Pinto has posted dozens of videos, in her native Portuguese, and built a community of almost 8,000 followers on YouTube alone. Her success has also impacted SUA. The Office of Admission saw 500% growth in submitted applications from Brazil between fall 2021 and 2022.

“A lot of people have the desire to study abroad, but they think it is really hard or that you have to be rich,” Paié Pinto said. “When I started posting, it was to show that it was possible, that if you have this dream you can achieve this.”

Her Path to Soka

As a child, Paié Pinto had gone to a Soka school in Sao Paulo until she was 7 years old. Years later, she reflected on its values as she grew discontented with the path of declaring a major and applying to a Brazilian university that her highly competitive high school was preparing her to follow. She wanted something different: an opportunity to study abroad and return to the kind of supportive environment she fondly recalled from her childhood school.

Paié Pinto visited Soka University in Japan, where she knew several students, but was unsure about being so far away from her family in Brazil. A trip to SUA made her decision easy. “It was the right thing for me,” she said. “I just followed my heart.”

In her second year on campus, Paié Pinto started an Instagram account focused on her life at SUA. She kept the account private so she could see who was following it. “I was actually very shy,” she said.

Only a week after she started, SUA’s campus closed because of the pandemic. Back in Brazil, remote learning was proving difficult. Paié Pinto was studying international relations but wasn’t sure about where it would take her after college, and she missed the non-academic aspects of SUA life. While scrolling through TikTok one day, she noticed people posting about how they had achieved a particular goal. Paié Pinto made a video about how she’d gotten to SUA, with images of herself studying in high school and then on Soka’s campus. People began asking questions about the school, the process of applying, and studying abroad. Her viral video was a response to some of those questions.

Her initial resistance to the exposure of social media, and concerns that people might view her as trying to become famous, began to dissolve as her videos seemed to help high school students who had the same hopes she once had.

“What’s interesting about this whole thing is that I only realized what I wanted to do when my TikTok went viral,” said Paié Pinto, who has changed her concentration to social and behavioral science. “I always liked to edit videos and edit pictures—my mom’s a photographer, my brother’s a photographer and a graphic designer—but I never really thought about doing something related to it as my career. I’ve found a way to connect the things that I like to helping people as well.”

Paié Pinto’s posts with the most views are those emphasizing the good, and often unusual, aspects about the university: all students receiving laptop computers, for example, or that students can study abroad without paying additional tuition. While those videos capture people’s attention, and are important for students with financial constraints, Paié Pinto is careful to present the whole picture as she views it. “I don’t want to show an image that Soka is perfect, or to try to bring students here for the wrong reasons,” she said.

Inspiring Her Followers

The cadence of social media rewards people who post frequently. Paié Pinto does feel some pressure to do so, but is careful to remember her priorities are her studies as well as the campus experience she is posting about. Creating and editing videos can be time-consuming. Paié Pinto said she has many requests from people who want her to make videos in English, but doing so would add more time to the process as she’d need to add subtitles for her predominantly Portuguese-speaking followers.

Valentina Einsfeld ’26 was one of those followers. Einsfeld, who’s from Porto Alegre, Brazil, described herself as “one of the lucky three” students from that country in the current first-year class. “Giulia’s video was very persuasive,” said Einsfeld. “She showed SUA’s best qualities, from the beauty of the campus to the generosity of the donors. But what was most interesting to me was the study abroad opportunity. She did a wonderful job displaying how amazing the university is and how special its opportunities are.”

Renata Duarte Ferreira ‘26, of São Paulo, was online looking for colleges in the United States when she found Paié Pinto’s YouTube channel and TikTok video. “She helped me a lot with amazing information about Soka,” she said.

Social media, Ferreira said, is a great way to learn about what makes a college special. “Students can share the real experience of studying at the college, and they show many things that are not available on the university’s website,” said Ferreira. Einsfeld agrees. “I would have never found SUA without Giulia’s post. Today social media is the most efficient way to get your message across. Giulia’s three million views in the video got me here today, and her platform grows fast.”

Paié Pinto appreciates when students thank her, but doesn’t want to take all the credit when SUA students tell her they are here because of her videos. “I tell them, ‘no, you are here because of you,’” she said. “You knew of Soka because of me, but the rest is totally up to you.”