Instagram Surpasses Twitter By Hitting 300 Million Users Per Month

It is now official. Instagram has just surpassed Twitter in terms of the number of users per month. About nine months ago, Instagram had already hit 200 million users. And right before the year ends, the photo sharing app manages to hit 300 million users every month. This makes Instagram bigger than Twitter, which as of six weeks ago, managed to rack up 284 million users. Interestingly, 70 percent of all Instagram users come from outside the United States, which just reflects the popularity of the photo sharing app worldwide.

Instagram has been steadily growing strong for the last few years. When Facebook acquired Instagram, users were worried that the social network giant would make changes to the photo sharing app. But everything turned out quite well -- Instagram now averages about 70 million photos shared daily, and has an estimated total photos of 30 billion so far since it was first launched.

Instagram's meteoric rise is totally awe-inspiring. It was first launched on iPhone in October 2010, but by December of that year, the app already had attracted 1 million users. Then it just continued growing -- hitting 5 million users by June 2011; doubling to 10 million users by September 2011. By the time it was launched on Android in April 3rd of 2012, it had already accumulated 30 million users. A day after that, 1 million Android users signed up; five days later it went up to 5 million Android users; by the time the month April ended, Instagram had acquired 50 million users in total. Then last year in February, the app had reached 100 million users. By March of this year, the count was 200 million users.

As for Facebook, it manages to buy itself considerable foothold in the mobile world. Apart from Instagram's 300 million users, Facebook has its own 1.35 billion users to date. On top of that, there is the 500 million users of Messenger and the 600 million users of WhatsApp.

After surpassing Twitter, perhaps the next step that Instagram needs to take is solidifying its authenticity. Indeed, the folks behind this phenomenally popular photo sharing app is planning to launch verified badges for celebrities, sports stars, and even brands. This would allow people to differentiate the legitimate Instagram accounts from fan-made, look-alike, or parody ones. 

This tactic had worked well for social media platforms like Twitter and even Facebook, which started verifying accounts in May of last year. The verified badges will no doubt be in-demand, especially for users trying to boost their social media following.

Also, Instagram has now moved on from deactivating fake and spam accounts to deleting them entirely, which means that they will no longer be seen in follower counts (if you see your follower count decrease, do not worry -- Instagram is just getting rid of the suspicious accounts following you).