Instagram is officially more popular than Twitter.
The Facebook Inc.-owned social network, which lets users share image and videos, announced yesterday that it has 300 million monthly active users.
Instagram has grown 50% since late March. Twitter, for the sake of comparison, has 284 million active users.
What’s notable about Instagram’s growth is that its users are also growing increasingly engaged with the platform, according to a recent report by social media analytics firm Simply Measured Inc. The average engagement—which includes likes and follows—per post on the platform has grown 416% over the past two years.
Moreover, while it has become increasingly difficult for marketers to deliver their messages to shoppers on other social networks, such as Facebook, brands are interacting with consumers on Instagram at a much greater rate than other social networks. In fact, top brands’ Instagram posts generate a per-follower engagement rate (4.213%) roughly 42 times that of Pinterest (0.097%), nearly 58 times higher than their Facebook posts (0.073%) and more than 120 times that of Twitter posts (0.035%), according to Forrester Research Inc.
That’s why Instagram is where marketers should focus as they seek to get closer to their customers, says Nate Elliott, a Forrester vice president and analyst. “There’s a lack of clutter, a lack of an algorithm that’s designed to filter out brand’s content, and that makes it the place to build relationships with customers,” he says. That stands in contrast to Facebook, he notes, which announced last month that in January it will change its news feed algorithm—the formula that determines what consumers see in their news feeds—to minimize the number of consumers who see a brand’s organic posts if Facebook deems them too promotional.
Instagram also says that in the next few days it will begin verifying the brand, celebrity and athlete accounts on its platform. That’s akin to Twitter’s “Verified account” icon, which uses a checkmark next to the account name to denote that it has verified an account. The move follows Instagram’s launch last month of a People tab on the Explore page of its app, which highlights people and brands a user might be interested in following. Verified accounts aim to solve a question that Instagram kept hearing from its users: “People ask, ‘When it comes to public figures and brands, how do I know that the people I discover on Instagram are really who they say they are? How do I know that this person really is Tony Hawk?’” writes Kevin Systrom, Instagram CEO, in a blog post.
The social network says it is also working to delete spam accounts from its service. “As more people join, keeping Instagram authentic is critical—it’s a place where real people share real moments,” writes Systrom. “We’re committed to doing everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the web, and that’s why we’re finishing up some important work that began earlier this year.”