Instagram's Nice Factor Is Key To Its Victory Over Twitter

When people think about ranking social networks, it's usually Facebook #1 and Twitter #2. Well, there's a new #2 in town and that's Instagram


Keep this kind of diversity of content in mind when considering Instagram's big announcement on Wednesday that it now has 300 million monthly active users, zooming past Twitter's reported numbers of 284 million monthly actives (per the company's latest figures).

Those are old-ish numbers, though, so perhaps Twitter will catch up in its next quarterly announcement. Then again, Instagram's active user growth is off the charts.It hit 200 million in March while Twitter's growth has all but flatlined. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind which service is winning this game.

The odd thing is that Twitter gets way more mentions from the media megaphone than its photographic brethren. News and magazine shows are often urging us to tweet; more rarely do they urge us to Instagram. That may be different in everyday conversation. Still, when we talk about tweeting, the assumption is we're involved in some sort of intense buzz-worthy conversation, be it reasonable debate or angry feud. When we talk about Instagramming, it calls up images of shallow selfies and food snaps.

So Why Isn't Twitter Growing Faster?

One explanation may be Facebook's purchase of Instagram, which gave it access to an audience of 1.35 billion. But even if that were true and Facebook hasn't exactly been pushing the service  it doesn't have anything to do with more users actively using it, month in, month out.

 I glance at my Instagram feed again, and the answer seems obvious. Instagram is the only service (Facebook included) that offers all of the good aspects about Twitter the immediacy, the international aspect, the humor, the personal connection, the ability to follow anyone with little, if any, of the bad aspects.

Over on my well-thumbed Twitter feed, the usual problem persists: too much noise, not enough signal. That doesn't mean I'm following the wrong people or that I'm not interested in what they have to say. On the contrary, I'm too interested, sucked into the stream of snark, the litany of links, the urgency of arguments. I could get distracted for hours and find myself amused, entertained, informed and connected to the conversation of a nation. But that all comes at a cost.

I'm often left with a slightly icky feeling after scrolling through my Twitter timeline a feeling that is hard to admit, since I'm a Twitter junkie. Sometimes, it's the same dismal sensation one gets from simply reading the news these days; other times, it's the sense that we're all increasing our attention deficits, never quite completing our thoughts, reading too fast, shouting too fast. We're all turning into smart alecks skating lightly over the deeper truth in search of a retweetable wisecrack.
 

I often end a Twitter session irked by some casual injustice, the magnification of which is what the service seems to specialize in. For example, look at a story that cropped up time and again in my Twitter feed Wednesday: A Harvard Business School associate professor who wrote nutty emails to a local Chinese restaurant over what he thought was a $4 overcharge. There was an awful lot of sound and fury about this guy. Mostly, the fact it was shared, reshared and reshared signified that people love to pile it on when they find a case of perceived idiocy. They may be right; they're also displaying a mob mentality. Hence the slightly icky feeling.

With Instagram, however, I feel refreshed, like I've just visited a miniature art gallery staffed by friends and talented strangers. In this app and it is still very much an app, given that the web version won't let you post pictures yet there is time to properly contemplate each window into another life. Each frame takes just enough artful composition that we tend to take our time in posting them. There's no Instagram equivalent of a tweetstorm. The volume is manageable. Check back a few times a day, and you're likely to actually see every photo in your feed.

Based on the numbers, it's not hard to predict the winner in this race. Twitter has known this day would come for a long time, judging by its efforts over the last few years to reinvent itself as a photo service.
Twitter has forced upon us in-line photos (you still can't opt out of them on the site); it has inundated us with photo filters; its app has prioritized pictures over text (remember when your photo stream wasn't the first thing to pop up when you hit "compose new tweet"?).

Really, Twitter should have the advantage over Instagram when it comes to posting photos. You can post them at any aspect ratio without any square box limitations. And Instagram photos are still hobbled on Twitter, thanks to a two-year old dispute between the companies.

Did Any Of That slow Instagram's Growth? Not In The Slightest.

It seems users don't really mind the creative constriction of that square box; rather, they find ways to make it work to their adventage. Not only does that box force users to think about composition, it also standardizes the photo stream. It's a level playing field: every photo on the service has the exact same number of pixels to play with.

 Related:Instagram Now Has 300 Million Active Users More Than Twitter

Twitter, meanwhile, is saddled with all that pesky reverse-chronological text, though you get the sense from every update that the company wishes it were otherwise. It can tweak the service as much as it likes, but Twitter will never likely reach a point where the majority of tweets come with photos. Twitter is as much a fundamentally word-based medium as, say, a news website.
This is not a bad thing. Twitter is a powerful service that has come to dominate real-time news and conversation, and that's a fine niche. It is never going to be all things to everyone. The Instagram statistic should be a wake-up call for social networks to focus less on user numbers and more on user engagement, the way a service like Pinterest does.
As for Instagram? With 50% user base growth in 9 months, it's on a roll, and has certainly proved a very shrewd $768 million investment for Facebook. This is an art gallery we all want to lose ourselves in.