If you’ve logged onto Instagram in the last 12 hours and viewed the “stories” of your mates, no doubt you’ve seen some dogs, some cats, some birds, who knows – but LOTS of Pet photos. The call-out is that for every pet photo someone will plant a tree – but who?
This is all based off a new feature of Instagram called “Add yours”. It’s built to encourage more sharing, and more discovery.
For example, If I post a photo of my dinner and then put an “Add yours” sticker on there, and label it – Here’s My dinner – what’s yours? Then people can tap that sticker and take a photo of their dinner.
Simple. If you see that sticker in a story, you can tap it to see who else has shared their “dinner” and maybe you’ll follow them.
But. Somewhere, sometime in the last day or so, someone posted the “Add yours” sticker that says “We’ll plant 1 tree for every pet picture🐶”.
When you see it, you click Add Yours and simply snap a photo of your pet. It’s viral.
A few hours ago it was at 1 million shares, at the time of writing this, it’s at 3.3 million.
That’s 3.3 million pet photos. But is it 3.3 million trees to be planted?
Problem is, we don’t know.
It’s not evident from the sticker, or the information in the sticker who started the trend.
I tested this today, by adding my own.
When someone else responded, I was able to see a “started by trevorlongau” tag, and I’m guessing that’s shown to people who follow or are in the network of the original creator. But, for now, I can’t see and I don’t think anyone can – who started this trend – and thus, who has the outstanding commitment to 3.3 million trees – and counting.
Likely it was some genius Social Media account manager at a Pet Food brand, not realising they’d go this viral:)
I suspect we’ll get an app update at some stage to add in a “creator” link, so anything that happens like this can be traced in future.
