Twitter was delivered some bad news thanks to a mobile measurement from Canadian firm comScore which statedthat smartphone users in the U.S. visited Instagram more often and for a longer period of time than Twitter. The report was for the of August and was the first time that social network Instagram surpassed micro-blogging site Twitter in mobile visitors.
comScore mentioned that 7.3 million daily active users (DAU) visited Instagram, while Twitter grabbed 6.9 million DAU’s during the month. The more disturbing fact for the leader in micro-blogging was the fact that Instagram users spent 257 minutes on average using the site. Twitter was able to hold the attention of their users for only 170 minutes in August, resulting in far less user engagement.
The comScore data is made more interesting by another piece of data that shows Twitter had 29 million unique U.S. smartphone visitors for the month of August had Instagram had slightly less than 22 million visitors. This data was derived from smartphones that had iOS, Android and BlackBerry operating systems among a pool of 110 million U.S. smartphone users in the US. What this shows is that there were fewer Instagram mobile visitors than Twitter but these users ended up spending more time on Instagram while also coming back to the site more frequently. This indicates that Instagram users are more engaged and could be troubling for Twitter.
Instagram is only two years old and has gained incredible popularity over that time. With Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has a dilemma. Although they hold very popular mobile properties including Facebook Mobile and Instagram, the company has still had issues deciding how best to monetize their mobile platform.
Twitter seems to have gained an edge here with the company claiming that that their two year old ad program is now generating profits. eMarketer data states that Twitter has created $130 million in mobile ad revenue for 2012. In comparison, Facebook has projections of $72 million of revenue from mobile ads over that same period.
Source: All Things D