The above post from an unknown group on 4th January 2019 stirred up Instagram when it crossed Kylie Jenner’s post for the most liked picture on Instagram.
A simple photo of a brown egg, now being called Eugene, amassed over 51 million likes on the social networking platform, which is almost 2.5 times the picture uploaded by Jenner.
As soon as this happened, questions starting flooding the internet – Is the egg encrusted in diamonds? Does it have a famous YouTube channel you’ve never heard of? Is a sexy celebrity holding the egg?
Nope. None of the above. Just an egg. The image and the plea caught the fancy of many celebrity TV shows, news channels and everyone who frequently accesses Instagram.
This is not the first instance of something happening like this. In 2017, Carter Wilkerson, a teenager posted a tweet asking Wendy’s (the fast food giants) about the number of tweets required to get free nuggets for a year. The kid received 3.5 million retweets and won the free nuggets for a whole year. Who says, chicken dinner is for PUBG only.
So How Did ‘Eugene – The Egg’ Win This Battle?
Instagram is one of the prime social media platforms in the world today. It amasses over 1 billion active users per month and has over 100 million posts uploaded every day. Now the question rises that how the picture of a simple egg beat all these uploads, to become the most liked picture.
In today’s age where social media is filled with challenges, memes and celebrity likeness, Eugene’s unique combination of challenge, humour and celebrity competition is the reason for its success. In fact, the Egg Gang or Egg Soldiers used the power of Kylie Jenner’s fame and combined it with humour to unite Instagrammers to support their goal.
It bought people together to form a community, and leading social media experts to state that building online communities will deliver results. Be it in growth, getting viral or in revenue forming, online communities increase the reach.
There is a wide variety of such communities, playing around with different genres. The people who posted the pic of the egg also did the same by forming a community known as the Egg Gang to club people together in achieving their goal’. Once they formed the community for a specific goal (beating Kylie Jenner’s Post), it became a mission.
Was the Post Getting Viral Enough for Eugene’s Success?
The answer to this question is a big ‘NO’. While on the front-end it seemed like that Eugene’s success was completely due to the post going viral, the crux of the phenomenon was at the backend, where Instagram’s unflawed operational mechanism played its part.
The servers were able to handle the heavy traffic, without crashing, unlike what happened with Twitter. On March 3rd 2014, Ellen DeGeneres posted a selfie that hit more than 24 million likes on Twitter. However, the servers of the platform were not able to handle the traffic and crashed for an entire day!
The Role of Data Centers
There are approximately 500 million daily users of Instagram. And to support this rapid growth, and provide a seamless experience to the users, Instagram has scaled its infrastructure globally. With the help of regional data centres, the enterprise can distinguish between global and regional data.
The enterprise has also been able to mitigate the increased load on databases by reducing the number of access from a single database. Further, the data centre networks, running at a speed of 100 Gbps, are able to transmit a large volume of data; therefore, minimizing the chances of any downtime.
There is no specific period or reason for a post to get viral. While Instagram has an infrastructure to support any sudden usage surge, other smaller apps and business models do not have access to such top-notch infrastructure.
Thus, to scale up operations and business availability at crucial junctures, enterprises can opt for colocation data centres. By doing so, they can not only cater to a larger user base but also provide real-time services to their customers, in case something goes viral. Remember, all it took was an egg to de-throne Kylie Jenner.
Rajani Baburajan
Reference
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/326261
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/326304
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/networks/data-center-networks-are-getting-faster-and-smarter
