Why everyone’s posting pictures of this pool

IT INVOLVES two beautiful women, a bizarre social media feud, a conspiracy, and a brilliant marketing strategy. Welcome to Le Riad Jasmine.

A weird feud about these images made this the most famous pool on Earth.

COULD this be the world’s most famous pool?

It’s got white and blue tiles, potted plants, comfortable cushions, and by all accounts it’s extremely inviting. It’s also everywhere on the internet.

The pool first shot to fame as the subject of an extremely weird social media feud, and an extremely effective marketing campaign.

Lauren Bullen and her boyfriend Jack Norris travel the world, sharing photos of their wanderlust-inducing travels on their Instagram accounts (@gypsea_lust and @doyoutravel, respectively). Between them, they have almost two and a half million followers, and in the digital sphere, they’re a pretty big deal.

The pool is located at a hotel called Riad Jasmine in Marrakech, Morocco. The pair travelled there earlier this year, sharing an image of themselves having breakfast by the pool in July.

Fast-forward a few months, and a copycat account called @diana_alexa shared the same image. The account also mimicked shots taken around the city and in the Moroccan desert, as well as snaps from Ms Bullen’s trip to Greece.

The original image Lauren Bullen shared on her account @gypsea_lust.

In November, Ms Bullen called it out with a post on her blog.

However, given that some of the locations were obscure and expensive to reach, and the woman in the copycat posts was wearing the exact same clothing as Ms Bullen, conspiracy theorists speculated the two were working together in an attempt to get more publicity for Ms Bullen’s account. A quick Google search of the @diana_alexa Instagram handle also proved that the two accounts shared the same email address, however, that account has now been made private.

Ms Bullen denied claims the allegations about a copycat account were fake, telling Cosmopolitan: “Jack and I are already well established influencers who work with such high clients and have a reputation to lose. Why would we risk planning something that could back fire in our face? That just doesn’t make sense. And even with the risk, how the hell would we know it was going to go viral? We NEVER expected or wanted this by sharing it on our pages.”

That said, she gained 200,000 followers the week the story broke.

Sceptics say they were working together because it’s too hard to copy obscure locations like this.

The Riad Jasmine pool is now internet-famous.

It’s been run by French couple Gabriel Paris and Alice Tassery since 2015, and the pair wasted no time in launching a new social media strategy.

“We earned so many followers and new guests after they [Ms Bullen and Mr Norris] shared it. It has been a crazy time and a win/win collaboration,” Ms Tassery told Mashable.

She refused to divulge the secrets of how she courts bloggers and influencers.

“We do not want to say much about our way to work with travel bloggers as we do not want people to copy us, we can just say that there is no rules for collaborations and always something to discuss in order to have a win/win relationship.”

Since then, she estimated more than 80 per cent of guests have come to the hotel because they saw pictures of the pool on either Instagram or Pinterest.

The results speak for themselves.