What is Instagram? How should I use it?
Instagram is a video and photo sharing social network that launched in 2010. The original developers were Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. As the platform gained success and became a valuable social network — Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 Billion. Facebook now owns and develops the popular photo sharing platform. In September Instagram had 800 million monthly active users, and 500 million daily active users — and I’d assume that it has grown even more since then. Instagram shows no sign of dwindling popularity, so learning the ropes of Instagram is a valuable social asset if you’re interested in social media right now. Instagram lets you share photos with the world, and users can follow you to receive your photo uploads in their home stream — or you can enable private account which allows you to pick and choose who is allowed to follow your account. This feature is good if you want to just share photos with friends and family but not the entire network of Instagram. The most followed account on Instagram is Instagram itself with 228 million followers.
Instagram is active — consistently active
Twitter has 330 million monthly active users. That is less than Instagram’s, daily active user count. Google+ still has 111 million active users but only 3.5 million have created fifty or more posts in the last 30 days. That is to be expected, only a handful are pushing out content — while many are still just reading or checking up on a social network once pronounced dead by tech journalists. Snapchat has about 250 million daily active users. YouTube has 1.5 billion monthly active users, one of the biggest if not well known places on the internet besides Facebook. And of course, Facebook has 1.37 billion daily active users. These numbers give us a little perspective on the major social networks in existence today. Instagram isn’t the biggest or most active, but it definitely grabs third place. I’d rank them as follows: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram.
Instagram is the third biggest and most active social network
So in terms of reaching people in an engaging manner, or seeing the latest photos from your favorite vloggers, YouTubers, celebrities, or anyone else you like to keep tabs on — Instagram is the best place to go. If you’re not active on Instagram yet, you might want to do that. If you’re not photogenic that’s fine too; you can just make an account on the social network to follow your favorite inspiring people. I have an Instagram account, and right now I mostly use it to see the latest photos from Casey Neistat or MKBHD and then some other friends of mine. I definitely want to reach a point where I am sharing parts of my day in the form of photos on Instagram. I guess we’ll all warm up to taking photos of ourselves for Instagram sooner or later.
