Today we are taking a look at the rise of social network Instagram.
First let’s go back to the basics, what is Instagram? Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them either publicly or privately on the app, as well as through a variety of other social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr.
Why is Instagram so successful? It is all about the visual elements. A picture is worth a thousand words, and now a picture can speak to millions of people from all around the world.
Let’s look at the relevant numbers about Instagram. In September 2015, Instagram hit the number of 400 million monthly active users.
(Photo by Statista.com) – Regional distribution of Instagram traffic in the last three months as of April 2016, by country
According to the latest statistics, most of Instagram traffic comes from USA. This statistic represents the regional distribution of Instagram traffic in the last three months. As of April 2016, the greatest share of desktop traffic to Instagram was from the United States, 19.97 percent of traffic, while traffic from the United Kingdom accounted for 3.92 percent of site visits.
How does Instagram affect marketing trends?
The trends in marketing world change constantly. Today, success in the marketing world is becoming is less and less about TV ads and paying for ad pages in a magazine and more about earning attention by nurturing the dominant media-technology platforms where consumers spend time. Advertising revenue generated by Instagram hit $600 million at the end of 2015 and jump over 146 percent to reach $1.48 billion in 2016, eMarketer estimates. Instagram ad revenue will account for 14 percent of Facebook’s total mobile ad revenue in 2017, eMarketer predicts, highlighting how key the standalone app will become for the social networking site.
We can conclude that Instagram is changing everything around us – from art, photography and fashion to food trends and even affecting wider issues in society with activism.