Instagram has doubled the number of active advertisers it has on its network to 1 million. The social network, which one year ago had as few as 200,000 advertisers to its name, has experienced a steady pace of growth ever since. Back in September, the Facebook-owned company announced that it had grown to include 500,000 advertisers but today this number has now doubled to over 1 million. The significant increase in numbers perhaps doesn’t come as a surprise to many, though.
Last year Instagram started pushing businesses on its platform with the creation of business profiles, of which there are now more than 8 million on the network. With this, Instagram allowed businesses on the app to add contact details, their location, phone numbers and, when advertising, the option to purchase a product. As well as this, in order to take advantage of Instagram Stories, the social network added the ability to add links to them to drive traffic to websites. Considering all of these options, as well as the fact that Instagram’s user base sits at over 1 billion – of which 400 million are active each month – it’s no surprise the network has experienced such a large amount of interest from advertisers. For those wondering how effective the new business profiles are, though, the company has claimed that over 80 percent of users follow at least one business account.
Over the course of the next year, the company is sure to push for an even bigger increase in advertiser numbers and it appears the company has a couple of options up its sleeves. To further increase interaction through the app Instagram is said to have plans to introduce a new button that will allow users to book appointments or make bookings with companies. In addition to this, they will be adding further info for multi-image posts and Instagram Stories. For now, these are all the details Instagram has revealed surrounding what can be expected from its business accounts, though the social network will surely announce a number of other features over the course of the year. For now, it’ll remain to be seen how successful the company will be at pushing its advertising business to potential customers.