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Instagram To Overtake Twitter For Marketing In The US

By Elin Box on October 23, 2015

Global Marketing News – 23rd October 2015

Instagram to overtake Twitter for marketing in the US

Research by Emarketer predicts that the number of US companies using Instagram for marketing purposes will overtake the number using Twitter within 2 years.

Currently, around a third of US companies with over 100 employees use Instagram for marketing purposes, compared to two-thirds who currently use Twitter for such purposes.

It is predicted by 2017 that the number of companies using Twitter will remain largely unchanged at 67%, but that the number engaging in marketing on Instagram will be risen dramatically to 71%.

Instagram is a popular image-based social network, with approximately 300 million monthly active users.

Overall, 88% of US businesses currently use social networks for marketing, with Facebook being the most popular social network with 85% currently using the platform.

Number of daily internet users rises in Germany

The number of people going online every day has risen sharply in Germany, according to research by ARD and ZDF.

63% of Germans aged over 14 now go online every day, equivalent to 44.5 million people. This is an increase of 3.5 million people on just 1 year ago.

Older citizens in particular were flocking online in droves. An estimated 800,000 Germans aged over 70 have come online in the last 12 months, an increase of 44% on last year.

But whilst the number of people using the internet every day has risen, the amount of time people are spending online has not. The average amount of time that German internet users spend online is now 108 minutes per day, a significant drop from 166 minutes per day last year.

The news comes as smartphone penetration overtook laptop penetration in the country for the first time ever.

75% of German internet users now have a smartphone, compared to 72% who have a laptop and 45% who have a tablet.

The increase in smartphone penetration is being touted as a key reason behind the rise in the number of people going online every day, with the number of apps and online mobile messaging services rising all the time.

Facebook pours $1 million into Indian app development

Facebook has awarded over 1 million US dollars to various app developers in India as it attempts to salvage its damaged reputation in the country.

Facebook encountered trouble in India earlier this year shortly after it launched its Internet.org initiative in the country.

Facebook’s Internet.org project aims to provide key basic internet services to mobile users for free. It faced widespread criticism in the country amidst concerns about internet neutrality, however, which culminated in several major players withdrawing from the app.

In response, the social network rebranded the app to be called Free Basics and launched a competition called the Innovation Challenge to encourage Indians from selected demographics to develop apps to be included in Free Basics.

The categories were farmers, women, students and migrants, with the top three apps from each category receiving the money, which totalled 1.2 million US dollars in total.

Yandex.Money partners up with MasterCard

Yandex.Money has entered into a partnership with MasterCard.

The partnership means that Yandex.Money users will now be able to pay online at any of the 250,000 online stores in Russia that use MasterCard’s online payment platform.

Yandex.Money is a popular online payment system in Russia, where it has over 22 million users, and around 12,000 new users joining every day. The number of payments going through Yandex.Money has increased by 50% in the last year.

The Russian B2C ecommerce market is worth an estimated 23 billion US dollars, with a digital buyer penetration rate of 42%.

Twitter launches polling feature

And finally, Twitter has launched a polling feature.

Twitter users can now create polls which ask a question and have two answers. The polls remain open for 24 hours and users simply click the answer they most agree with.

Twitter has said that the way users vote will not be shared publicly or passed on to corporations.

Twitter is one of the most popular micro-blogging platforms in the world, with almost 240 million monthly active users.

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Elin Box

Content Marketing Manager at Webcertain
Elin is a Content Marketing Manager at Webcertain. She is responsible for Webcertain’s Self-learning platform, producing in-depth guides on a range of international digital marketing topics. She also helps run the Webcertain blog and is the writer of the Webcertain search and social report, an annual report summarising digital marketing best practices in over 50 countries. She is passionate about educating and empowering people to make the best decisions for their business and is proud to help share Webcertain’s wealth of digital marketing knowledge with the world. Elin is from the UK.

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