“We’re proud to announce that there are now more than 300 million Instagrammers.” It’s with these words that Kevin Systrom (CEO of Instagram) began his article today.
Let’s compare Instagram’s growth with their latest important milestone in March 2014.
– 300M users vs 200M in March 2014
– More than 70 percent of its users are outside the United States of America vs 65% In March 2014
– 30 billion pictures shared vs 20 billion in March 2014
– More than 2,5 billion “likes” everyday vs 1,6 billion in March 2014
and last but not least, more than 70M pictures shared everyday vs 60M in March 2014.
Despite the fact that Tumblr is the fastest growing network, Instagram remains the most popular visual social network and has now surpassed Twitter in terms of monthly active users(284M).
This was not the only news Systrom shared today on Instagram’s blog.
Verified Accounts on Instagram
“Today, we’re excited to announce verified badges for celebrities, athletes and brands(…)These badges will start rolling out over the coming days.” announced Kevin Systrom.
With the new certified accounts feature rolling out, we can see the influence of Facebook.
The badges will ensure brands legitimacy on the network as many brands have copycats. Sometimes fake accounts even surpass the official brand account in terms of followers
As it is only the beginning, we can ask ourselves if Instagram will a merging feature? Creating an effecting way in boosting the numbers of followers for brands’ official accounts..
Now, with 300 million monthly users, Instagram’s audience is clearly becoming very attractive to advertisers and marketers, and its constant growth ( +100M users in 10 months) will only make it more appealing.
As Instagram’s ad business is still very new and offers tons of opportunities, we guess more brands will start running Instagram ads campaigns.
Keeping Instagram authentic
As Kevin Systrom added, Instagram has “been deactivating spammy accounts from Instagram on an ongoing basis”. These fake and spammy accounts will be deactivated forever, which means a variation of followers or followings. Despite these potential losses it is a great news for brands with a large audience that will see an increase of their engagement rate (most of these spammy account are inactive).
Instagram’s new authentication feature guarantee advertisers that their followers will be real people and that the impressions they receive will not be fakes or bots. Something Facebook has been criticized for.
