You have, by now, probably heard about the egg. A single image of a speckled brown egg, posted to the Instagram account world_record_egg on January 4, has become the most liked image on Instagram, racking up 30 million likes in little more than a week and breezing past the previous record holder, reality TV star Kylie Jenner.
The image is the only one on the Instagram account, and was accompanied by an exhortation to those passing by. “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 🙌”
The Instagrammer’s success is a rare victory for the unpaid viral campaign on social media. “There is a bit of an anti-celebrity revolt here – ‘look what we can do with a simple egg’”, says Anastasia Denisova, a researcher of internet memes at the University of Westminster, who compares it to the campaign to get a British research vessel named Boaty McBoatface.
But an egg unseating Kylie Jenner wasn’t the only shift at the top of the viral charts this month.
Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of Japan’s largest online fashion retailer, unseated Nevada teenager Carter Wilkinson as the possessor of the most retweeted tweet in history. Wilkinson was set the challenge of getting 18m retweets by the Twitter account of fast food chain Wendy’s in order to get a year of free chicken nuggets. He didn’t get there – his tweet got around 3.5 million retweets, surpassing the 3.3m shares of a selfie taken at the 2014 Oscars by TV host Ellen de Generes received – but he got the nuggets anyway.
Maezawa beat Wilkinson’s record not by creating a star-studded selfie, like Ellen, or by co-opting members of the public into a campaign to help him receive a personal reward. He basically bought his way to success, offering a share of 100m yen (£720,000) to 100 randomly picked people who retweeted his post.
The Japanese billionaire’s tweet blew past Wilkinson, receiving 5.2m retweets to date. Maezawa faced some backlash for his direct approach.
“It’s much more elegant – hence pleasant – to make something viral without a financial reward,” says Denisova. “Viral logic makes sense when we look at the gains and motivations of people who contribute to viral campaigns – they find something close to their heart in them.”
Sadly, good will can only go so far, and there seems to be a new normal when it comes to vitality: a celebrity sets down a marker (whether it’s De Generes and her Oscars selfie, or Jenner’s Instagram photo) which is then overtaken by a “hearts and minds” campaign by an ordinary Joe.
Then, like everything good, business comes in and ruins it. Maezawa offered a fraction of a percentage of his vast fortune as a barter to break records.
Concerted efforts are required in public-wide campaigns to make posts go viral nowadays as social networks mature and develop more stringent business models. While moderate viral success is possible, organic reach on posts can only take you so far – by design.
For years Facebook has charged users to “boost” posts into user’s news feeds, limiting their reach. Twitter’s equivalent – promoted tweets – was launched in 2010. “If you're not setting one of those annual instances, then you absolutely have to push your 'virality' with paid media to get it seen by the eyeballs that matter,” says James Whatley, a former employee of advertising company Ogilvy.
“It was always hard to go truly viral,” says Whatley. “But social networks have changed because they’ve realised how much money they were missing out on and the sheer volume of content we consume each day means it’s harder than ever for stuff to catch on.”
Similar shifts are occurring on YouTube. PewDiePie has been the platform’s most subscribed channel since late 2013, but is threatened by the rise of T-Series, an Indian conglomerate that produces Bollywood films and music. The threat of T-Series overtaking the homegrown YouTuber resulted in a renewed effort to keep him top of the tree. To date, he’s managed to keep his crown as the most-subscribed YouTuber.
However, two can play at that game. While everyday content creators need to keep looking over their shoulder in fear of big companies overtaking them, once they’re cemented as a viral success they often adopt similar practices. Less than 24 hours after world_record_egg became the biggest thing on Instagram, they posted an image to their Instagram story. “You spoke, the egg listened,” it read. “Official egg gang merch incoming – sit tight!”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
