Instagram The Ruler ,The Saviour

The features which made Instagram stand out of the crowd .

From sharing our photos and video, along with it various pictures which includes sport, fashion, home architecture, fitness videos, travel photos, food review, celebrity pictures, etc., Instagram is like a whole world which keeps our attention to it. It has become an important part of our daily life. We lost ourselves on Instagram.

I had few questions in my mind, from when this app started ruling us? Was it a great hit during its initial period itself? Currently how many active users are there and how many photos are shared? I thought Of sharing this with you all.

Instagram is photo sharing and video-sharing app owned by Facebook created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. The Instagram app was launched on Oct. 6, 2010, and racked up 25,000 users in one day. At the end of the first week, Instagram had been downloaded 100,000 times, and by mid-December, the number of users had reached one million. The Android version was released in April 2012. In April 2012, Facebook made an offer to purchase Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock; a key provision was that the company would remain independently managed.400 million monthly active users,40 billion photos shared and 80 million photos on average per day and 3.6 billion likes per day.

Then I wondered why so? Even though there are many other apps to share photos and content. Then I questioned myself, as a user which features make me fall in love with the app.

The Topmost is that Instagram is an amalgam of other social media apps like Insta stories like Snapchat, messaging like a messenger with video calls, suggesting users from one user like LinkedIn, saving photos, and creating new collections like Pinterest, hashtags like Twitter, Reels are more like TikTok videos. So the best things all in one app. There are other features which you would also be using .

13 Instagram Features that made users fall in love with the app

1. Archive Posts/Stories — I post a picture and then after few days I don’t want it to be in my profile. So I can just archive and restore whenever needed.
2. Close Friends List — When I wish to share my Story with only a particular group of friends, this feature helps.
3. Turn On Post Notifications — When I am following a celebrity / favorite account, I wish to get notified whenever they post a picture, then this feature helps.
4. A post about a mouth-watering cheesecake or a tutorial that shows you how to draw the perfect eyebrows. One week later there you are, struggling to remember who posted it, when on earth you saved it on your phone, or did you? Then IG came up with a feature to ‘Save Photo’ and create a Collection of it like Pinterest.
5. Drop a glass on the floor and do you want to see a rewind of it. Just Use the ‘Rewind tool’
6. When I wish to paint along with my pictures in the frame, this feature helps. After flooding the story with my favorite color, the fun part begins when I start using the eraser tool.
7. Search for location/Restaurant — When you want to know about a particular restaurant and food to try it there or new tourist places. All you have to do is search for the location, restaurant
8. Saving and Posting Instagram Live Videos: If you miss watching out live videos of people, you can just check out the profile for the saved live videos.
9. Suggesting users from a user. When I click drop down in a profile, IG suggests many users related to that account which helps me to dig those accounts too. I am stuck here browsing accounts for ages.
10. Story highlights: Instagram stories are evolved from Snapchat filters, but here I can able view stories in highlights even after 24 hrs.
11. Instagram Filters: Instagram has awesome cool filters where we can use Instagram as a photo editing app and we can save photos without posting them.
12. IGTV videos: Nowadays people are born on Instagram as content creators.IGTV videos are best for content creators.
13. Reels : Reels are more like TikTok videos where people share their videos and a place where we could have fun just by watching those

Instagram has made shopping more easier where we can able to check for reviews and buy stuff. People in IG have started many online classes too. Many fitness videos in IG keep me inspiring about the life of people all over the world. There are many awesome features in IG but these are the topmost features that make me fall in love with the app again and again.

Although Instagram has everything we want. We as a user would wish this could be in a better way.

Things I wish Instagram could provide us ….

1. I wish Instagram allows us to upload photos from pc.
2. Since hashtags are much more used in IG, I wish Instagram shows us trending hashtags
3. Notification when someone unfollows: I wish IG notifies if someone unfollows my account because I need another application to check this, Instead of I would like to have it on Instagram itself
4. I wish IG gives us the option to enable birthday notification
5. I wish some interesting posts which are shared by other people to be in my account as well. For now, I can only share my story.
6. I wish Instagram provides us to add the link in the captions itself instead of checking the bio.
7. And people sometimes search for captions on google or somewhere. I wish Instagram create a catalog of quotes which user can search by hashtag. So users can find cool caption in Instagram itself

My priority is …

From the few features which I wish IG to improve on

1. I feel giving support to upload photos via a personal computer is a more prioritized one. Not all the time, people use mobile phones for social media networks and sometimes they may have their good photos in a personal computer which they would like to upload, So transferring it to phone and posting it from there seems to be extra work. Since the main goal of the product is to share photos. I feel this feature is the topmost priority.
2. The next thing I feel important is caption search, IG is more concerned with user engagement so if caption support is provided within Instagram, people would spend extra more time in the app.
3. And the third one is birthday notification. Facebook always does it. So even if I forgot the birthday of someone, it would be better if this helps so then this again involves more engagement with the app …

If you are in the age group of 18 -30, you might be using Instagram, share your favorite features and things you wish Instagram could improve.

Let’s appreciate the best in everything and let them know