
14 Jul Instagram Rise is burying Twitter in the debris
Instagram growth continues to scale mountains as the social network platform’s monthly active users has now doubled over the past two years to a sky scraping 500 million.
According to the platform, they have added an average of 10 million monthly active users every month for 27 consecutive months.
This whopping growth further catapults Instagram as a special elite force that continues to put distance between itself and its competitors in the social media arena.
Twitter in particular is one platform being put to the sword by Instagram. Twitter is currently drowning in Instagram’s rising tide with a gap of 35 million active users separating the two apps in the United States.
Further shovelling dirt atop the Twitter coffin is the fact that while globally the platform amasses 310 million monthly active users. In comparison, Instagram now boasts 300 million daily active users.
Instagram & Music
The music industry in particular is one sector that is finding success aboard Instagram. Posts by Beyoncé and Drake timed to recent album releases drove follower increases of 28 percent (up 16 million) and 16 percent (up 3 million), respectively. Since Beyoncé announced her “Formation” single in February on the platform — as well as her Lemonade album and video special in April — her posts have racked up 151 million interactions; Drake’s meme campaign for his Views album amassed 52 million interactions.
Instagram is still tweaking its platform to fuel further growth. Back in April, they added video channels to the Explore tab to help you find cool new clips to watch and interesting people to follow. Today, the app makes those suggestions even more customized by organizing videos into specific categories, and recommending certain ones to you based on your Instagram activity.
When you head to the Explore tab in the app, now you’ll start seeing “Picked for You” channels. These cover a wide variety of topics: special effects makeup, hair tutorials, gymnasts, huskies, cookies, baking, and comedians are but a few of the options you could see in your app. There’s also an “Oddly Satisfying” category for rounding up all those weirdly hypnotic videos you can’t help but watch over and over again. You’ll get served up (hopefully) relevant topics based on the kinds of Instagram posts you tend to watch and Like.
Lastly, and most important to bear in mind, is that Instagram says video use is up 150% over the last few months, so clearly people are posting a lot more videos than ever before and watching them too.