As you may have heard, Beyoncé is pregnant with twins – or as one Twitter wag put it: “Sad that there are more black people in Beyoncé right now, than in Trump’s entire cabinet team.”
We’ll stay on topic in our coverage of the announcement though: Beyoncé chose to reveal the news on her Instagram account, and the reach of her photo-post has been startling even by her standards.
At the time of writing, the post has 6.9m likes and 355k comments. The first of those figures is a new record for Instagram, overhauling in a mere 10 hours the previous record for most likes on a post – 6.3m for a Coca-Cola-advertising pic posted by Selena Gomez in June 2016.
This in turn is a sign of the importance of Instagram to Beyoncé, who has 92.9 million followers on the app, which she uses instead of Twitter for the focus of her social media life.
“Instagram is something that Beyoncé most of the time uses directly herself: she posts pictures. It’s her way of communicating to fans a little bit of what her personal life is like,” her digital strategist Lauren Wirtzer-Seawood told Music Ally in November 2014.
“As an artist, Beyoncé really prefers to communicate in images. It’s very hard to say what you want to say in 140 characters.”
Wirtzer-Seawood now works at Instagram, bossing its partnerships with music more generally.
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