Instagram Crosses 300M Users, Overtakes Twitter As New Players Change The Social Media Game
Photo-sharing social network Instagram continues to grow, announcing it now has more monthly active users than publicly-traded micro-bloggin...
http://www.africaeagle.com/2014/12/instagram-crosses-300m-users-overtakes.html
Photo-sharing social network Instagram continues to grow, announcing it now has more monthly active users than publicly-traded micro-blogging site Twitter.
In a blog post published this week, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said Instagram had 300 million monthly active users, while at last count Twitter boasted 284 million.
Twitter has been struggling to maintain momentum amid several consecutive periods of slow growth and questions around whether it could ever reach Facebook-like saturation (Facebook currently has around 1.3 billion active members).
Meanwhile the Facebook-owned Instagram appears to be thriving on the ease with which its users (who are generally younger than Twitter's) can capture a moment of their lives and share it instantly, a process which is more awkward and takes longer on Twitter and Facebook.
On average, Instagram users share 70 million photos a day. To date, users have shared 30 billion photos.
Yet Instagram is also keen to avoid some of the pitfalls chasing users away from Twitter, announcing that it intends to purge the site of "spammy" accounts and non-human users. It has warned that some users may see a consequential drop in their number of followers.
"Follower counts will be fully accurate and only reflect the actual human beings or actual accounts that are following you," said Gabe Madway, Instagram's communications chief.
"We want you to believe that your interactions and the people you share with are real people and are following you in good faith."
Research firm eMarketer estimates about one-sixth of US smartphone users — 52.5 million — use Instagram. Of those, nearly 80 per cent are between the ages of 12 and 34.
"We're seeing a lot of people coming in the fashion world, a lot of people coming in, in the youthful teens world, and a lot of people internationally as well," Systrom told CNBC.
Instagram will also be rolling out a system for verifying the accounts of celebrities to cut down on imitation accounts and, with recently-announced changes to Facebook including a reduction in meaningless sponsored posts and the Twitter-like ability to search for posts according to key terms, Twitter would appear to be caught in a pincer movement.
To make matters worse the three social giants are far from the only players, with Tumblr and Pinterest actually leading them all in terms of overall growth in active users.
Fresh data from the Global Web Index shows that while Instagram's active userbase has grown by 64 per cent in the past six months, Tumblr's has grown by 120 per cent and Pinterest's by 111 per cent. Twitter's efforts have seen a 26 per cent growth, while Facebook appears to have hit a saturation point with only 2 per cent of growth.
The numbers appear to show the changeability of social media habits, as when GWI released numbers earlier this year Instagram was ahead in growth by some margin.
Analysts have greeted the rise of Instagram as validation of Facebook's approach to aquisition. Rather than folding smaller companies and technologies like Instagram into its own platform (which has clearly hit a plateau in terms of growth), Facebook has let Instagram run as its own network since acquiring it for $US1 billion in 2012.
Instagram began running ads last year, and its 300 million user base is "very attractive" to marketers, says eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.
"Instagram's ad business is still very new and has a lot of growing up to do — for example, its targeting capabilities are still very limited," she says. "But the company's new authentication initiatives send a message to the ad community that their followers will be real entities and that the impressions they receive will not be fakes or bots."
Source: The Age
In a blog post published this week, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said Instagram had 300 million monthly active users, while at last count Twitter boasted 284 million.
Twitter has been struggling to maintain momentum amid several consecutive periods of slow growth and questions around whether it could ever reach Facebook-like saturation (Facebook currently has around 1.3 billion active members).
Meanwhile the Facebook-owned Instagram appears to be thriving on the ease with which its users (who are generally younger than Twitter's) can capture a moment of their lives and share it instantly, a process which is more awkward and takes longer on Twitter and Facebook.
On average, Instagram users share 70 million photos a day. To date, users have shared 30 billion photos.
Yet Instagram is also keen to avoid some of the pitfalls chasing users away from Twitter, announcing that it intends to purge the site of "spammy" accounts and non-human users. It has warned that some users may see a consequential drop in their number of followers.
"Follower counts will be fully accurate and only reflect the actual human beings or actual accounts that are following you," said Gabe Madway, Instagram's communications chief.
"We want you to believe that your interactions and the people you share with are real people and are following you in good faith."
Research firm eMarketer estimates about one-sixth of US smartphone users — 52.5 million — use Instagram. Of those, nearly 80 per cent are between the ages of 12 and 34.
"We're seeing a lot of people coming in the fashion world, a lot of people coming in, in the youthful teens world, and a lot of people internationally as well," Systrom told CNBC.
Instagram will also be rolling out a system for verifying the accounts of celebrities to cut down on imitation accounts and, with recently-announced changes to Facebook including a reduction in meaningless sponsored posts and the Twitter-like ability to search for posts according to key terms, Twitter would appear to be caught in a pincer movement.
To make matters worse the three social giants are far from the only players, with Tumblr and Pinterest actually leading them all in terms of overall growth in active users.
Fresh data from the Global Web Index shows that while Instagram's active userbase has grown by 64 per cent in the past six months, Tumblr's has grown by 120 per cent and Pinterest's by 111 per cent. Twitter's efforts have seen a 26 per cent growth, while Facebook appears to have hit a saturation point with only 2 per cent of growth.
The numbers appear to show the changeability of social media habits, as when GWI released numbers earlier this year Instagram was ahead in growth by some margin.
Analysts have greeted the rise of Instagram as validation of Facebook's approach to aquisition. Rather than folding smaller companies and technologies like Instagram into its own platform (which has clearly hit a plateau in terms of growth), Facebook has let Instagram run as its own network since acquiring it for $US1 billion in 2012.
Instagram began running ads last year, and its 300 million user base is "very attractive" to marketers, says eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.
"Instagram's ad business is still very new and has a lot of growing up to do — for example, its targeting capabilities are still very limited," she says. "But the company's new authentication initiatives send a message to the ad community that their followers will be real entities and that the impressions they receive will not be fakes or bots."
Source: The Age
