Instagram shows no signs of slowing down. The service now boasts a whopping 600 million active monthly users, and that last 100 million joined in just the past six months. Instagram’s only real competition is Snapchat. And while the latter may be the more popular teenager hangout, the real marketing takes place on Instagram.
Yes, Snapchat took the industry by storm and has influenced everything from how we consume content to how we hold our cameras and what we expect from businesses. But the frenzy seems to be waning, in part because Snapchat hasn’t appeared in recent news quite as often as Instagram.
Instagram has earned its press coverage and its place in the social-media spotlight. Here are a few of the leading reasons behind all that buzz.
Many major changes in core offers.
While Snapchat has busied itself testing ads and playing around with Spectacles, Instagram has announced and rolled out new features with astounding frequency — close to one each week.
Instagram’s latest 100 million users are familiar with the service’s feed only in its current algorithm-based form. They’ve never known Instagram as a chronologically ordered platform.
At first, that major change struck legacy Instagrammers as a bad idea. Instead, it’s proved to allow users to cash in big. The algorithm-based feed is good for Instagram because it’s intuitive for followers. The cries for a chronological feed have hushed as more people realize they enjoy seeing the most relevant content,…