Instagram has seen 100 million users sign up within the last nine months. In terms of active mobile users, Instagram still lags behind its parent company’s 1.3 billion, as well as Facebook-owned apps WhatsApp (900m) and Facebook Messenger (700m). But it remains ahead of Twitter’s 316 million monthly active users.
In 2010, when Instagram was just starting out, Twitter already had over 100 million users.
When Facebook coughed out $1 billion to buy up the company just 18 months later, many raised eyebrows, but we all seem to agree it was a smart decision and a smarter decision was to allow Instagram operate independently without too much input from Facebook.
As they hit the 400 million users milestone and most people are now comparing them with Twitter, I wonder if Instagram is growing at Twitter’s expense (there is definitely a limit to the number of social media accounts one can create and operate constantly), I wonder if Twitter could not continue to grow because of bad choices they made or simply because Twitter was never meant to appeal to a mainstream audience like Instagram and photo-sharing has. I believe that Twitter missed it somewhere along the line. They were doing fine before, doing really great and they were genuinely on track to changing the world.
In these digital times, overtaking is allowed and it happens faster than anyone can really predict. A new social media app can start today and outgrow every other thing we have out there.
