Instagram is growing fast. Just over a year ago, Instagram announced they had amassed 100 million active users and as of this week are showing that this number has doubled. Overall, Instagram users have created and shared 20 billion photos on the app to date.
Facebook’s decision to buy Instagram in April of 2012 may prove to have been a very smart decision. While users are skewing a bit older on Facebook these days, Instagram is an attractive to a younger crowd, the 18-24 set that Facebook has been losing. Moreover, Instagram is a highly engaging content platform as more than half of its users use it daily.
This is great news for brands who want to leverage this platform as research from L2 Think Tank back in December showed that Instagram’s engagement scored much, much higher than other comparable social sites like Google+, Twitter and of course, Facebook. By and large, brands have created a presence on Instagram as a result. As of December of last year, 89 percent of brands had both a Facebook and Instagram account.
While brands are on board, there is evidence that they aren’t necessarily making the most of it. For all the engagement to be garnered, only nine percent were soliciting user-generated content on the platform and 12 percent had promoted their Instagram account within the past 30 days.
Source: PC Mag
