Sir David Attenborough breaks Jennifer Aniston's Instagram record

Since joining Instagram, the British naturalist has teased a mystery film project with Prince William

Sir David Attenborough is now on Instagram, and has become the fastest person to reach one million followers. EPA

Sir David Attenborough has certainly made an impact since joining Instagram.  Within four hours and 44 minutes of going public with his profile on the social media platform, the 94-year-old naturalist had a follower count of more than one million.

The race to a seven-figure following broke the record previously held by Friends star, Jennifer Aniston, says Guinness World Records.

At the time of writing, two days after joining Instagram, Attenborough had more than 3.7 million followers.

The beloved environmentalist, known for voicing several world-famous nature documentaries, joined Instagram on Thursday in what he explains is a bid to save the planet.

“Hello my name is David Attenborough and I’ve been appearing on radio and television for the last 60 years. But this is my first time on Instagram. I’m making this move and exploring this new way of communication, to me because, as we all know, the world is in trouble,” he says in his first post.

Attenborough goes on to name some of the environmental crises plaguing the planet before saying that over the next few weeks he will be recording messages to explain what the problems are and how we can deal with them.

The account is being run by the team behind A Life On Our Planet. The first post explains: "Social media isn't David's usual habitat so while he's recorded messages solely for Instagram, like the one in this post, we're helping to run this account. In case you're wondering, 'we' are Jonnie and Colin and we worked with David on A Life On Our Planet."

A mystery project with Prince William 

Since joining, Attenborough has shared two videos, as well as a series of Instagram Stories, one of which teases a mystery project with Prince William.

The image shows two black directors chairs, with the names Prince William and Sir David written on them, on his Story, Attenborough wrote, "Stay tuned".

Prince William shared the same photo to the Kensington Royal Instagram page, which he shares with his wife, the Duchess of Cambridge.

The royal shed little light on the project, simply captioning it with a series of emojis (a pair of eyes, a video camera and the Earth). He did however geotag the image to Kensington Palace the Cambridge's home in London.