Instagram announced that in just six months it has doubled the number of advertisers actively using its platform.
The company said that it now has 500,000 active advertisers, up from 200,000 in February. Most of the growth comes from five countries: US, Canada, UK, Australia and Brazil.
“Instagram is a place where people turn their passions into purchase. With companies from varying industries on the platform, it’s no surprise that 50% of Instagrammers follow a business. More than just following businesses, 60% of people say they learn about a product or service on Instagram,” the company said in a blog post.
Facebook-owned Instagram also took the opportunity to tout the efficacy of advertising on its platform, highlighting that 75% of its users take action after seeing a post, visiting a website, searching, shopping or telling a friend. Since the company opened up its advertising program in September, there have been 1 billion actions taken on Instagram ads.
“In fact, 70% of performance campaigns generated statistically significant lifts for online conversion or mobile app installs. After evolving the link ad format in June, performance on those ads increased more than 45%. And the value of ads extends beyond mobile, contributing to a 2% lift in offline sales,” Instagram said.
While Instagram is a long way off from securing a comparable number of advertisers as its parent company Facebook, it has almost lapped Twitter. Earlier this year, Facebook said it had more than 3 million monthly active advertisers, while Twitter claimed 130,000 advertisers in the fourth of quarter of 2015.