How to be popular on Instagram courtesy the world record egg

The New Year has begun with an egg breaking records on Instagram and the world has been taken by storm! This light brown egg’s picture has been liked over 26 million times since it was first uploaded on January 4, dethroning Kylie Jenner’s birth announcement as this photo-sharing app’s most liked post till date. On the picture of the egg they posted they wrote, “Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this...”

What is it about the egg that intrigued the world at large, it made us wonder? This account has amassed a follower number of 6.7 M and has been verified by Instagram already, which has probably never been heard before in the social media virality space yet. There are trends that go live every now and then, sure, some even extremely bizarre to follow, but a trend is a trend. This picture has nearly 45 M likes (44,585,865) at the time of writing this story.

It all probably started with Twitter (trends) years ago when we could ascertain what had made news that day or hour or sometimes even a week. Remember that selfie that Ellen DeGeneres had taken at the Oscars in 2014? It became the highly retweeted and then-favourited picture of all time which was succeeded by the chicken nugget tweet. What’s even more interesting is how, an egg is a default picture and sometimes even considered a bot account on Twitter, while Instagram seems to have recognised the egg’s true mettle and made it the most-liked picture on the app.

As per the New York Times, “If everyone who liked the photo created a new city, it would be the world’s second largest, beating Shanghai. The egg’s fans have passed the population of Australia.”

Interestingly, the account owners have also begun selling merchandise related to this egg. One of the tee-shirts looks like this:

A tee-shirt in black that promotes the World Record Egg on Instagram (https://everpress.com/worldrecordegg)

We second the thoughts of the person behind this account… what a time to be alive!

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First Published: Jan 16, 2019 14:53 IST