Instagram has been growing extremely quickly this year, with over 100 million new users added since March, 2014 alone. This incredible growth has now put them up over Twitter in terms of monthly active users (Twitter has 284 million monthly active users). This is especially important given the fact that Instagram is owned by Facebook, the largest social network in the world.
In an announcement celebrating this accomplishment, Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram, said, “Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community that shares more than 70 million photos and videos each day.” With this many videos and photos being uploaded, shared and viewed by millions it is not surprising that Instagram is also one of the top marketing tools for affiliate marketers today.
In the same announcement they said that so far over 30 billion photos and videos have been shared through their platform, and over 70% of the users are outside of the United States. Perhaps most impressive is how active the users on this site actually are. Those who use Instagram hit the like button a combined 2.5 billion times each and every day.
With this much traffic, however, comes a major concern over how much of it is valid. Automated traffic has been a growing problem for all social media, and it is something that Instagram is taking seriously. To start with, they have added verified badges to those high profile accounts that they confirmed are actually owned by celebrities, bands, brands and athletes. Any account that is likely to be impersonated may get a verified badge in the near future.
The company has also confirmed that they will be working hard to ensure all their accounts are authentic. Of course, this will be an ongoing battle between the image based social network and the spammers. Instagram continues to inactivate known spam accounts, and they will soon be deleting them entirely so they are not counted in account follower stats and things like that. For marketers, this could mean that your numbers will get a significant drop in the near future, especially if you have ever paid for followers on the site.
Overall, this is very positive news for Instagram and anyone who uses the site in a legitimate way either to share personal images and videos, or to market their products or services over this very visual medium.
