For this #FridayFunFact, we’re digging to the bottom of a questions that keeps marketers up at night: If you took every single photo uploaded to Instagram over the course of a year, printed them out and stacked them up, how high would they reach?
Keep in mind how many #corgisofinstagram selfies there are out there…
Okay, so that might not be the social media marketing question you had top of mind…. But since we talk about strategies to combat channel explosion and content overload on a regular basis here on the TrackMaven blog, it’s helpful to step back from time to time and put the sheer volume of content emanating from our social media-obsessed population in perspective.
So we’ll pose the question again: If you printed off all the Instagram photos uploaded in a year, how far would they reach?
To help you make a more educated guess, know that Instagram users upload a whopping 60 million photos to the network every day on average, or 21.9 billion photos a year.
In case your spatial reasoning still isn’t helping you make sense of that staggering number of photo uploads, Photoworld, part of Europe’s largest photo company, CEWE Ltd, has provided a solution.
Photoworld created an interactive infographic to help us visualize just how much visual content the world uploads to Instagram. (It’s meta visualization!)
Would a year’s worth of Instagram photos stack higher than the Empire State Building? Yep. In fact, The Empire State Building is merely the height of the hypothetical stack of photos uploaded to Instagram every 37 minutes!
Would the stack of Instagram uploads leave the Earth’s atmosphere? Yep. In fact, the height of our atmosphere could only contain 6 day’s worth of photos.
Higher than the International Space Station? Yep, you guessed it. That would only contain the equivalent of a month’s worth of Instagram uploads!
Now, before you start wallowing in fear of Instagram insignificance, here are a few takeaways from our Fortune 500 Instagram Report. For this report, we analyzed the Instagram strategies from the world’s largest brands, and discovered the following:
- Instagram is a 24/7 Network: Whether it’s a weekday or weekend, people are consistently engaging with content on Instagram. Our analysis found no significant correlation between time of upload and social interactions for Instagram photos. However, while there is no optimal time to publish picture content, videos gets more engagement in the off hours (presumably because people are less likely to watch videos at work).
- Instagram is a Social Discovery Platform: In our analysis, we found a strong positive correlation between the number of hashtags brands use on Instagram and the number os social interactions per photo/video. The average number of social interactions per Instagram post increases with increasing hashtag usage, leveling off at 4-5 hashtags.
- When in Doubt, Choose Mayfair or Nothing At All: Based on our analysis of Fortune 500 brands on Instagram, the two most effective filters are Mayfair, with 23.04 average interactions/1K followers, and Normal (aka #nofilter), with 18.01 average interactions/1k followers.
Now peruse through the interactive infographic from Photoworld below!
Click image to open interactive version (via Photoworld).