Instagram Has Announced Some Really Big Numbers In April

April was a huge month in the world of Instagram.

The app has announced that it now has 700 million monthly active users, 400 million of them daily, 200 million of which use Instagram Stories every day and 375 million of which use direct messaging monthly.

Twitter has been left behind. Snapchat too.

Let’s take a closer look at this and other news, plus also look at the average profile growth and engagement we’ve seen on the platform.

Instagram growth and engagement in April

2,500 profiles we looked at grew by 0.11% on average in April. This is an 8.33% drop compared to the growth in March.

Profiles posted 2.56 times per day on average. Images stood for 88.47% of all posts.

Post engagement rate was at 1.1% of the audience (same as in March), while 99.1% of all engagements were likes.

Images engaged 1.2% of the audience, while videos engaged 0.7%. The average image post now gets 71.43% more engagement than the average video post. It’s no wonder that almost 90% of all posts on the platform are images.

The Instagram growth is accelerating

One of the main charts Instagram employees look at is the “Days to Reach the Next 100 Million Users” chart. Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, said: “It’s the only graph in the company that we celebrate when it declines”. And this chart decreases regularly.

Instagram has added 100 million more monthly active users in the last four months. The app now has over 700 million monthly active users. Its growth is accelerating. It took the app nine months to go from 400 to 500 million, six months to go from 500 to 600 million and four months to reach 700 million. Some 400 million of these use Instagram daily, and more than 80% of all users are from outside of the USA.

And they don’t plan to stop this growth anytime soon. Systrom added: “My favorite thing to ask the team is, how large do you think Instagram will be eventually? Usually you get to some large number, and it’s definitely more than two times the size we are now. So I can confidently say that most of the people who’ll eventually use Instagram don’t use Instagram now.”

The all-out assault on Snapchat is continuing

The all-out assault on Snapchat is continuing too. Instagram Stories launched in August last year and is now up on 200 million daily active users. Snapchat is at 161 million daily active users.

And Instagram is continuing to attack Snapchat by copying its features and introducing the new sticker tools during the month of April. Instagram has also united the temporary and permanent messages into one Instagram Direct inbox. Direct messages are now used by 375 million users monthly. Just look at this increase in the speed of cloning of Snapchat features:

Source: techcrunch

There was a new update to the “Saved Post” feature too during last month. 46% of all Instagram users have saved at least one post since the introduction of this feature last December, and everyone can now save posts in private collections too.

Crackdown on sponsored posts

The Federal Trade Commission, a government agency that regulates advertising, has started a crackdown on sponsored posts on Instagram. All sponsored posts need to have a clear disclosure but this rarely happens. Celebrities often just include a #sp or thank the brand, but this is not enough:

Source: buzzfeed

Take a look at our complete guide to this: FTC Sends An Angry Letter About Product Endorsements. Celebrities And Instagram Targeted.