This Is Why Instagram Is Winning Over Flickr

Instagram is an application-based mobile photo sharing, video sharing and social media company that allows its users to take photos and videos directly within the app, and then share them on multiple social networking sites, including its own. Instagram was acquired by Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) in 2010 for $1 billion.

Flickr, on the other hand, is an online image hosting and video hosting website. The company has become a popular website for users to share and embed photos, but it has found a lot of success in being used by photo researchers and by bloggers who use Flickr to host the photos they embed in posts and social media. Flickr was purchased by Yahoo (YHOO).

While both companies specialize in photo sharing, Instagram has been growing faster than Flickr due to its unique approach to social sharing. As of July 2015, Instagram has over 300 million active users, more than triple that of Flickr.

Instagram Is Better for Connecting With Friends

While Flickr does promote itself as a social sharing site where users can share photos with friends and family, its strongest business is as a photo library for bloggers and other professionals and as a hosting platform for hosting bloggers' photos.

Instagram, on the other hand, is strictly a media sharing company for photos and videos. Instagram users are much more engaged than Flickr users, and they actively seek out photos and videos of their friends. Forrester Research reports that Instagram generates 120 times the engagement per user than Twitter.

In addition to driving engagement within the app itself, Instagram also lets users share their photos on all the major social media websites, even Flickr. This means that the company can engage users when they are both on and off the app. Engaged users equal a stronger business for social networking sites, and Instagram's engagement per user is much higher than Flickr.

Instagram's Use of Hashtags

While Instagram was not the first company to use the hashtag, its become one of the most effective companies to use hashtags. Flickr has been unable to unlock the full potential of sharing and engagement through hashtags.

When a user wants to discover new and interesting photos or people on Instagram, it's natural for that user to search a specific hashtag. This increases the discoverability and engagement of the app far above the discoverability of Flickr.

Flickr is a platform for more general discovery rather than the specific discovery of Instagram. Flickr offers a library of professional-quality photos that other people on the Web can use.

Instagram, on the other hand, gives a user the chance for more specific discoverability, where users actively seek specific hashtags.

While both models work for the respective companies, Instagram's more pointed discoverability makes the app more of a utility for users, meaning that users search Instagram more often than Flickr.

Instagram Is the Best Platform for Visual Advertising

According to the same study by Forrester Research, Instagram users have been found to like a photo 58 more times than on Facebook and 120 more times than on Twitter.

These stats shouldn't be shocking, but it should be a telling sign. Advertisers need to engage users where they are most likely to be to increase the return on investment of ad budgets, and as of August 2015, that place is Instagram.

With new advertising features and the ability for brands to create their own accounts, Instagram has built an incredibly efficient medium for companies to communicate with users. This means more advertising revenue for the company, as well as an unobtrusive approach to advertising that mitigates user attrition.

Source: This Is Why Instagram Is Winning Over Flickr