Instagram recently announced reaching 700 million users’ milestone showing how fast the media-sharing platform is burgeoning.
The platform which started as a free trendy iOS app almost 7 years ago is now growing into world’s number one app for video and photo sharing, and with Facebook behind its back that growth seems unstoppable.
Though Instagram community is the smallest of Facebook’s family of apps, crossing 700 million users mark is not just an achievement especially that 100 million users were gathered in just four months – Twitter only managed to add 9 million users in the first quarter of 2017. The photo-sharing service just announced passing 600 million users landmark in December last year and as of April this year the number had hit 700 million, an impressive rate that could see Instagram join her siblings in a billion plus user-base, probably at a similar time next year.
Other Facebook-owned services are way in front in terms of number of users; Facebook app stands at approximately 1.89 billion monthly active users, mobile instant messaging kingpin – WhatsApp – comes second with over 1.2 billion people using the client monthly while Messenger recently announced hitting 1.2 billion users milestone closing in on the sister.
Even as Instagram’s growth hits all-time high, there are some facts and figures about its user-base demography that you will be excited to learn or of interest to you. Naturally, if you were to ask men randomly to comment about Instagram’s users, chances are high that majority will tell you that the app is a thing for women and men who use it primarily as sissy. Well, Instagram scheduling company, Hopper, did a research and the results are quite similar and interesting as well.
Hopper investigated engagement statistics between posts by different genders and the results were by no means a surprise. You must have noticed the trend in each of the occasions.
The company sank deep into a case study on the engagement figures between posts by female Instagram users and their masculine colleagues using data from Instagram posts it has rescheduled for over two years and the outcome was quite fascinating. Hopper found out that there is a very large disparity between how people react to posts by female Instagram users and male users. According to the study, on average, posts by female Instagram users gather five times likes as posts published by male users, that is, 578 : 117. For comments, posts by female users get a third comments higher than posts published by men, 170 against 113.
The research further probed how men react to fellow men’s posts, in likes and comments, compared to how they do to posts by ladies and the results were not surprising once again. It came out that men have 10 times chance of liking or commenting on a female post than they would on a male published post. Looking further into how men react to fellow men’s posts, only 13% of the total likes and comments were made by fellow men.
These results shouldn’t be astonishing at all because ever since Instagram has been dominated by female users and a few male teens. As per Hopper co-founder, Mark Bender, this research is good for brands as they target different audiences but the challenge is massive for male oriented brands which must be extra smart when building followers.
The study also came up with a list of types of content that each gender finds interesting and follows:
Male Instagram users seem to love sports, gaming, clothing celebrity, cars, lingerie, friends and family, memes and fitness/motivation.
For female, their interest is mainly on markups, memes, lingerie, animals, travel, friends and family, food/recipes, clothing and fitness.