A stock image of a simple brown egg had gathered more than 30 million likes (as of 17:13 CET on January 14) on the social media platform, surpassing the 18 million generated last year when celebrity model Kylie Jenner posted a photo of her daughter Stormi.

The egg was posted on January 4 by Instagram user Egg Gang, under the handle world_record_egg, with the aim of taking over Jenner's record and making it the most-liked post on Instagram.

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"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 post's caption read.

Jenner responds

Jenner responded to her defeat, posting a video on Instagram of her cracking a brown egg over pavement. She wrote: "Take that little egg."

Egg Gang's victory has already seen a number of similarly named accounts trying to take advantage of its success, including world.record.egg.official and world_record_eqq.

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Another user sought to surf off the egg's success by posting a stock photo of a chicken, describing it as the mother of the egg. In this instance, we can clearly state that it was the egg which came first. 

It is not the first time a social media user has tried to use an overly mundane image to gather masses of likes.

In 2017, the Twitter account Half An Onion posted a photo of half an onion in a ziplock bag in an attempt to gain more followers than US President Donald Trump, but has so far only reached 635,000.

law/msh (AP, dpa)