Last week, Instagram celebrated its 10th birthday by rolling out a couple of new features for its users. One of the most widely used social media platform Instagram was launched on October 6th, 2010 and has evolved so much in the past ten years. Can’t believe it has been a decade already, feels like yesterday, no? Let’s learn about Instagram’s ten glorious years of success from the timeline;
2010 – The legendary launch
- October 6th was the first day of Instagram, and the company had already hit 25,000 users in a single day. It was the day when the first-ever picture was uploaded on the platform by the co-founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom. He added an image of his pet dog who was a golden retriever with the caption “Test”. Since that day, the total posts having #dog are counted as 278 million.
2011 – Hashtags were introduced
- Hashtags were introduced by the company to make posts more attractive. Every user started creating their own relevant hashtags to make their post stand out. The current top used hashtag in the history of Instagram is “#love”. Around 1,824 billion posts have #love in the caption.
2012 – Mark Zuckerberg now owns Instagram & the company rolls out “Explore” feature
- Instagram, despite having only 13 employees and no revenue at all, was bought by the Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg for several billion dollars. Since then, it has become Facebook-owned Instagram.
- In the same year, Explore Page was made available for the users worldwide. This page is no less than a blessing for Instagram users till now as you randomly get to see engaging posts of your interest based on your search activities.
2013 – Video sharing, photos of you & direct messages
- For the first two years, the users were only allowed to upload a single image on their newsfeed; however, a new feature of uploading a 15 seconds video was launched in 2013.
- Getting tagged by your friends in various photos but kept on losing them? Well, now you have a segregated tab named “Photos of You” where all the images that you are tagged in are present.
- Sharing memes with your friends are always fun. Felt the need to sharing Instagram posts and memes with your friends too? Well, the company has just released Direct Messages feature to connect with your family and friends to chat with them privately.
2014 – Image editing section added
- What could be better than editing your image prior to the upload in order to make it more attractive? Instagram added a cool editing section where users could not only apply Instagram filters on the picture but also adjust the contrast, brightness, sharpness, highlights, etc.
2015 – Short video ads
- For the first time, Instagram allowed advertisers to share video ads not exceeding 30 seconds limit. Since the platform now had millions of daily active users, advertising there would have been extremely beneficial.
2016 – The only year with most of the releases
- 2016 could be stated as one of the best years for Instagram users and the company as well because several new features were rolled out that attracted more and more users. To start with, the company needed a revamp in its application hence changed the icon and in-app design. However, the updates changed the entire look of the app but were made for the good and reflected creativity.
- Story feature pretty similar to Snapchat stories was launched where the users could add images or videos that would disappear after 24 hours. This is possibly the best and most widely used update ever as almost 500 million daily users upload stories on their Instagram accounts.
- E-commerce also stepped into the platform as Instagram introduced shopping tags where prices can be seen by tapping on the tags.
- Finally, the company allows users to post minute-long videos on their feeds.
- Last but not the least, Instagram goes Live as the feature was rolled out in November 2016. The users were allowed to go live for as long as an hour.
2017 – Multiple pictures in a single post
- Adding one single image from a good picture day was undoubtedly pretty difficult. Most of the users got indecisive and spammed the entire feed with their photoshoot. To help the users, Instagram launched carousel posts where one could add up to ten pictures in a single post rather than uploaded ten single photos one by one. The number of images attached in a carousel post is mentioned on the top right of the image and can be viewed by swiping left and right. The update was not only for images; videos can be uploaded as a mini album as well.
2018 –Instagram achieves a milestone & IGTV introduced
- The company was awestruck to hit a massive milestone of one billion monthly active users on the platform. At that time, Facebook was the number one social media platform used with 2.23 billion users, followed by YouTube on second having 1.9 billion users. Instagram succeeded in settling in third place.
- Now the limit for videos was exceeded even more and those longer than a minute were categorized as Instagram TV (IGTV) videos. The feature allows users to upload a video with a maximum limit of 10 minutes. However, content creators with greater followers were allowed to upload IGTVs of about 60 minutes.
2019 – Hidden likes & shopping checkouts
- The company first tested the feature of hiding likes counts and made it available globally shortly. Only the user who uploaded the post can view the number of counts.
- Since Instagram saw a great response on online businesses, it took the Shops to higher-level, i.e., launched checkouts on Instagram. The feature was much appreciated by the users and sellers both as it was pretty time saving and made sopping a lot convenient.
2020 – IGTV monetization & launch of reels
- Now the IGTV creators can make money from their videos as announced by the company itself. However, the IGTV videos will now be interrupted with short and automatic ads.
- Instagram launches reels allowing the users to create short videos not more than 30 seconds. Reels can be shared on the newsfeed and found on the Explore Page as well.
All these years, Instagram didn’t stop for once instead kept on evolving and making efforts to make the platform better and more engaging for its users. Let’s all wish Instagram Happy 10 years of incredible success and hope for more improvements in the coming years.
Infographic by: Vamp-brands.com
