14 DAY TRIAL // Today, Instagram has announced that it reached 300 million monthly users, thus managing to overtake Twitter, but remaining far behind parent company Facebook.
Instagram has grown significantly in the last twelve months and managed to almost double its number of monthly users, so it doesn’t come as a big surprise that it now has a bigger user base than Twitter.
We live in a world where food is instantly photographed and posted on Instagram and Facebook, so it’s pretty clear that these two services benefit from this growing trend in a way never seen before.
Instagram boosted its number of users from 200 million in March, experiencing one of the biggest increases as far as the overall count of registered accounts is concerned on the entire web.
Facebook still a leader
Despite this impressive growth, Instagram is still far behind its parent company Facebook, which has recently revealed a 1.35 billion monthly user base. Twitter, on the other hand, has been left behind with 284 million monthly users, which is probably the best indication that the shoot-and-post recipe brought to the world by Instagram is really appealing to the new generation.
But with such a rapidly growing user base, Instagram’s mission becomes more difficult when trying to keep the environment clean and spam-free.
The company says that it has already taken several measures to prevent spam from reaching Instagram and it has also removed several accounts that were identified as spam.
“As part of this effort, we will be deleting these accounts forever, so they will no longer be included in follower counts. This means that some of you will see a change in your follower count,” Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram, explained.
Copying Twitter’s example
In order to improve the user experience on Instagram, the company decided to copy Twitter’s example and introduce verified badges for celebrities, athletes and brands, thus making sure that people can find these accounts more easily.
“As more people join, keeping Instagram authentic is critical—it’s a place where real people share real moments. We’re committed to doing everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the web,” Systrom added.
The first badges will start showing up in just a few days, the company says. Twitter has been using verified badges for more than 3 years, thus adding more legitimacy to accounts supposedly used by famous people. Verified badges cannot be requests and are manually granted by Twitter.
