Social media service Instagram now boasts 700 million users, the Facebook-owned company revealed in a release published on Wednesday. In addition to hitting a record-high number of users, the platform also broke another internal record, as its last 100 million users have joined the service faster than any other comparable group of users so far. The Menlo Park-based company announced that its social media platform has 600 million users in mid-December, meaning that it averaged approximately 25 million user additions on a monthly basis for the last four months.
This news marks yet another major milestone for the Facebook-owned online service that has recently been boasting some immensely positive achievements. Earlier this month, Instagram announced that its Stories platform has over 200 million users, more than its largest competitor Snapchat has in total. Instagram Stories were initially inspired by Snapchat’s own Snapchat Stories and many industry analysts praised the California-based firm for the aforementioned achievement, claiming that Instagram beat Snapchat at its own game. Recent market surveys also suggest that advertisers are becoming increasingly happier with Instagram and the user engagement rates that its platform guarantees to major brands looking to improve their image and advertise individual products online.
The 700-million user mark that Instagram disclosed earlier today can be attributed to a combination of factors. The company introduced a wide variety of new features and tweaks to its service in recent months and started putting a larger focus on developing markets like India with functionalities such as the recently announced Offline Mode, in addition to creating in-house content meant to engage its existing audience, all of which ultimately reflected on its user acquisition and retention rates in an extremely positive manner. Given recent developments, Instagram is seemingly on the right track to become the fourth Facebook-owned service with over a billion users, a figure that’s currently only boasted by WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook itself. The platform is expected to debut a broad range of new features in the coming months, most of which will likely be focused on video, the format that its parent company believes is the future of commercial Internet. An update on those functionalities and Instagram’s other endeavors will likely follow soon.