Nobody is shaking this off: Pop superstar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram on Tuesday, and the likes exploded like pyrotechnics at a concert. The post broke Instagram's record for reposts, even though, to be fair, reposting just started on Instagram in August. Still, the post hit 1 million reposts in less than 6 hours and earned 14 million likes in just the first hour. By Tuesday evening, it had topped 21.2 million likes.
"Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married," Swift and Kelce wrote on an Instagram post showing multiple photos of the proposal. In the first photo, Kelce is kneeling in front of Swift in a breathtaking floral garden. The second photo shows them standing and holding one another. The next is her hand with an enormous diamond engagement ring, followed by two more of the couple embracing.
The two apparently got engaged in a breathtaking garden setting. Instagram
The post also features a dynamite emoji and the audio of Swift's 2024 song So High School. The snippet cuts off with the lyrics, "Are you gonna marry, kiss, or kill me?" (Let's hope it's the first or second option.)
Instagram post is already climbing into the millions
As you might expect, the Instagram post delivering the engagement news shot into the stratosphere as soon as it was posted on Tuesday. A representative for Instagram confirmed to CNET that Swift and Kelce's engagement announcement earned over 14 million likes and 452,000 reposts in just over an hour, reaching 21.2 million by 5 p.m. PT Tuesday.
That's a huge audience, but it will be interesting to see how high up Swift and Kelce's engagement news post lands on Instagram's all-time most popular list.
Right now, the most popular post ever on Instagram is from 2022, when soccer star Lionel Messi posted an image of himself hoisting the just-won World Cup. That post has more than 74 million likes. (Swifties, keep it going if you want to send that post to the top.)
The Instagram representative didn't immediately comment on whether Swift and Kelce's post is climbing at the same pace as Messi's. Messi also has the third-most popular post, again showing him and the World Cup trophy, this time snuggled up in bed together.
But it's not just soccer photos that top the Instagram most-viewed-ever list. The second most-liked post of all time is a photo of a plain, ordinary egg, posted to the social network back in 2019 as part of someone's experiment to see if such a mundane image could go hugely viral. I interviewed the person behind Eugene the Egg back in 2019 and am shocked to see it's still in the No. 2 spot six years later, with more than 60 million likes.
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