“If you extrapolate the growth, every nine months, Instagram has added 100 million users. In February last year, Instagram had 210 million users in India, and by November it had 309 million. By this month, Instagram will have added another 100 million users, reaching the 400 million mark,” a media planner said.
Instagram did not respond to an email seeking comments until the time of going to press.
ET reported last month that Instagram was the most downloaded viral short video social media app in India’s App Store and Google Play from January to June this year. As per data shared by Sensor Tower with ET, Instagram clocked 118,700,000 downloads while Facebook clocked 86,600,000 downloads during the same period.
Other homegrown short video apps clocked downloads ranging from 24,200,000–40,800,000.
The growth of Instagram in India comes at a time when parent Meta posted its first ever revenue decline as a public company for the quarter ended June 30.
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Facebook’s parent company, reported revenue of $28.8 billion for the three months ending in June, a 1% drop from the prior-year quarter.
The company’s net income during the quarter declined 36% year-over-year to $6.7 billion.
Reaching the 400 million mark in India would make Instagram absolutely critical for any brand’s media mix, irrespective of the category, according to Amit Tripathi, managing director of independent digital-first agency IdeateLabs.
“Influencers have become a key demographic for Instagram, and Instagram has opened up its platform with shopping and other marketing tools to make
more successful. Furthermore, given the deep penetration of the platform among the youth, it makes Instagram a must-have solution for brands that are embracing digital transformation in the region,” he added.
Anand Chakravarthy, an expert in digital marketing and media, said that if the platform gets to 400 million users, it could give advertisers more chances to reach people.
“Today there are many digital platforms that make it ‘technically’ easier to reach consumers. The real challenge, however, is figuring out how to engage an increasingly disengaged and low-attention digital audience on these platforms.The effort required for creative and engaging brand communication has never been more important than today. That’s where a lot more focus needs to go,” he added.
Prasad Shejale, co-founder and CEO of LS Digital, one of India’s largest independent integrated digital marketing and transformation companies, said reaching the 400 million mark says a lot about the power of pictures and videos to tell stories that resonate with the new generation.
“Brands must take this as a lesson in reaching out to the next generation of customers using video and pictures and build a brand on the power of stories,” he added.
Instagram’s short video format, Reels, has also catapulted its popularity in the country.
Instagram has said previously that several creators in India are growing rapidly as a result of the discoverability that Reels offers and that the platform is also seeing a greater set of trends emerging from regional languages and smaller towns. Trends from India have also gone global. Meta has also extended the ability to create reels that are up to 90 seconds long and has launched Remix and Collabs, which let users make reels with their friends or followers.
