Instagram has become more and more popular for business use and here are a few key stats to highlight why. Are you making the most of Instagram as a platform to drive brand awareness, communicate with current customers and reach new ones? If not then give us a call and we can help you!
The Instagram community has grown from 90 million monthly active users in January 2013 to 1 billion monthly active users as of June 2018.
1. Instagram’s more than 500 million active users place it well ahead of Twitter (326 million active users) Snapchat (150 million active users), and Pinterest (250 million active users).
2. The proportion of online adults who use Instagram has grown by nearly 400% since Pew Research Center first started tracking social media platform adoption in 2012.
4. Instagram and Snapchat are tied for the second-highest used messaging app (behind Facebook Messenger) for millennials at 47%.
Audience & Demographics
5. 72% of teenagers use Instagram and nearly as many (69%) use Snapchat. Both have increased by more than 20% since 2015.
6. 35% of adult internet users used Instagram in 2018, up from 26% in September 2014.
7. 71% of young adults (ages 18–24) used Instagram in 2018, compared with 37% who did so in 2013
8. In 2018, 60% of Instagram users used the platform daily, including 55% of young adults who visited several times a day. This 60% figure reflects a 9-point increase from 2016, when 51% of Instagram users reported visiting the site on a daily basis.
9. More than one-third of Instagram users have used their mobile devices to buy something online — 70% more likely than people who are not on Instagram.
Brand Adoption
10. Businesses that are on Instagram get up to 37% of their total impressions from Instagram Stories, the ethereal content that users can publish separate from their feed and disappears after 24 hours.
11. Eight of the top 15 most followed brands on Instagram are in the business of retail.
12. Approximately 80% of all Instagram users follow a business on Instagram.
13. In a 2018 study, the higher education industry had the highest engagement rate of any other industry per post on Instagram, at 3.39%. Second was sports teams at 2.28%, and third was nonprofits at 2.14%.
Hashtags & Location
14. In a study of 100 top brands, the brands’ Instagram captions averaged 2.5 hashtags per post.
15. Posts tagged with a location see 79% higher engagement than posts not tagged with a location.
Instagram Posting Strategy
16. In a study of 55 brands, all brands posted an average of 1.5 times per day.
17. The best time to post on Instagram is Thursday between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. in your respective time zone.
18. The most common posting frequency for brands on Instagram is 11–20 times per month, with almost one-third of companies measured falling into that bucket.
19. While Instagram is still by far the best social network for organic engagement, its per-follower interaction rate of 2.2% is barely half what it was in 2014.
20. In a study of 100 top brands, engagement per post has grown at a rate of 53% year-over-year.
21. In a study of several thousand brand posts, the average engagement rate is 4.3% and the median is 3.5%. That means that the average post in this sample saw 4.3 activities (a Like or a comment) per 100 followers. Phrased another way, to get 100 Likes and comments on a post, a brand would need approximately 2,325 followers.
