One Photo And Just A Few Words: How Completely Did Beyoncé Dominate The Internet?

In the first 45 minutes after it was posted, it had generated half a million tweets, topping out at 17,000 a minute. There have been, at the time of writing, at least 2,679 (now 2,680) news articles cumulatively written in less than a day about it — 840 of those written within an hour of its appearance, at 1:39 p.m. ET.

It generated an analysis of the art-historical provenance of her set design:

"Since the medieval period, the Virgin Mary has often been depicted wearing shades of blue, a color used to signify virtue and authority. The bright, cerulean blue background reinforces this association and might even take it a step further."

(Nevermind that there was, it turns out, an entire photo shoot, with disparate visual influences, titled "I Have Three Hearts" which was published on her website right after the post. Also worth noting, buried in the source of that photo album landing page, is that its programmers included a reference to Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious" in their code, including the lines "var isReadyForTheJelly" and "jQuery(isReadyForTheJelly());").

Beyoncé's pregnancy announcement — which didn't use the word "pregnant" in any variation, not to mention the words "baby," "twins," "announcement," "impending" or any of the other words that often accompany announcements like this — became, within a day, the most-liked Instagram post of all time, with 8.74 million hearts as of this writing. She clearly paid attention to Hootsuite's social media tips. The post has already soundly trounced the previous most-liked Instagram, a sponsored post by Selena Gomez, by some two million. It was, as everything Beyoncé does, power displayed and channeled, her working inwards for the benefit of the outside (and for her, too). That so many voiced some version of "finally some good news" bolsters the notion.

A comparison, via Google Trends, shows that power strikingly — even at a time of deep political turmoil sucking up most of the air on media both mainstream and social.

At least for a few hours. Beyoncé has in fact — and as Instagram was happy to point out to NPR — used the photo-sharing platform to announce her recent projects including Lemonade and her Formation tour and, now, the incubation of two babies at the same time. (Instagram did not respond to requests for specific data points on yesterday's post, nor whether Beyoncé had signed a particular deal with the service to secure those announcements.)

Her mastery of her image and her confidence in the power of it has been supported time and time again by the public's consumption of it. What's next? Some down time? Before that, though: Headlining Coachella in April, with a couple of prominent but unnamed special guests? Maybe.

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