We’re excited to be part of the Instagram advertising rollout, and wanted to share some key stats about the platform in advance of a webinar we’re doing Wednesday October 28th (sign up here).

Instagram’s growth over the past several years has been absolutely meteoric. It had just 50 million monthly active users in June 2012, 100 million in February 2013, 200 million in March 2014, 300 million in December 2014, and announced that it had 400 million monthly active users in September!  

These users come from all over the world; 75% of Instagram’s users are outside the United States, including 14 million in the United Kingdom and 5 million in Australia.  And Instagram users are key demographics for advertisers - in the United States according to Pew Research, 55% of Millennials use Instagram, along with 47% of African-Americans, 38% of Hispanics, and an overall 28% of all adults!

These people come back over and over again — the average millennial user comes back seven times per day, and 59% of Instagram users in the United States visit every day. 

Marketers are enthusiastically responding; just this week eMarketer estimated that by 2017, Instagram will be used by marketers at 71% of all companies in the United States. Additionally, RBC Capital Markets and Ad Age found that 72% of marketers are interested in allocating ad budgets to Instagram right now, more than 30 percentage points over the channel that drove the second most interest, Pinterest. Spend is following the interest; Instagram mobile ad revenues is forecasted to reach $2.81 billion worldwide in 2017, which will bring it into a dead heat with Google mobile ad revenue.

And while Instagram ads have only been available for a few months, it’s already clear that these ads work. Instagram evaluated 400 advertising campaigns run so far in 2015 alongside Nielsen, and found that 97% of the campaigns generated a significant lift in ad recall, with the average lift as 17 points — that’s 2.8 times higher than what Nielsen usually sees with online advertising! 

At Salesforce, we are excited to be a launch partner of the Instagram Advertising API as well as a Facebook Preferred Marketing Partner. Tomorrow, we’re hosting a free webinar on “How to Use Instagram Ads to Reach and Engage Your Audience”, and we’d love to have you join us. If you can’t make it tomorrow, please still sign up — we’ll be glad to send you a replay!