Instagram has recently surprised quite a few with their surge in active users to reach 300 million users. This figure is not only significant in itself. It also marked the fact that Instagram has now surpassed Twitter in active users. The latter is at 284 million users now. This brought speculations about whether Instagram is on its way to un-crown Twitter when it comes to be the best social news provider.
Speculations have been going haywire and some social analytics experts have even chimed in to remind marketers that Instagram has already surpassed Twitter when it comes to user engagement. The social analytics firm Socialbakers has, for instance, compared the top 25 brands for Instagram and Twitter engagement. The survey has demonstrated that engagement rates per post were nearly 50 times higher on Instagram.
The firm analyzed data for the 3-months period ending December 9 and found that the average engagement rate on Instagram was 3.31% per post for a major brand (taking into consideration likes and comments). For Twitter, however, the rate was at 0.07% per tweet and this took into consideration retweets, replies and favorites.
During the 3 months period, brands had on average 38 times more interactions on Instagram than on Twitter. For a comparative figure on Instagram the interactions amounted to 6.5 million a month while that on Twitter was about 167,000. Some of these brands were Starbucks, GoPro, Aeropostale, Victoria’s Secret and Forever21.
Speculations even considered whether Instagram would soon rise to be able to keep up with Facebook.