LONDON: Adrianus Wagemakers is an independent financial consultant in the areas of investment management, financial planning, and data analysis.
Just weeks before its five-year anniversary, Instagram announced that it had 400 million users, and that 80 million photos per day are shared on the social network.
Twitter will have its 10th anniversary in less than six months from now and has 316 million monthly active users who post about 500 million tweets per day.
For a long time, both platforms seem to have co-existed happily together, but today that may not be so true. Many people have accounts on both platforms, and when the same content is placed on both platforms, it can dilute the value of the content for each platform. The fact that Instagram is now open to advertisers means that they will also be competing for much of the same advertising budget that Twitter is going after.
Of course in many ways Twitter is different to Instagram. People make short announcements, with or without links to other sources, engage in conversations and retweet tweets by other accounts. Twitter has also greatly improved the ability to share photos and videos, and this is exactly the area where Instagram is active.
If Twitter users observe their timelines carefully, they will see that an estimated 1 out of 6 tweets contain media (photos, video’s or gifs). Based on a total of 500 million tweets per day, this translates to about 80 million tweets per day containing media. This is roughly the same number as the total posts on Instagram per day, and would mean both platforms are equally large with respect to content creation with media.
