59% of the World’s Top Brands Are Active on Instagram, Lo-fi Is the Top Photo Filter

According to a recent study from Simply Measured, 59 percent of the world’s top brands are now active on Instagram, up from 54 percent back in November. This puts Instagram behind Pinterest (69 percent), Google+ (70 percent), Twitter (97 percent) and Facebook (99 percent).

“Since we first started tracking the Interbrand 100 back in August 2012, top brands have created 19 new Instagram accounts, compared with 18 new accounts on Pinterest,” Simply Measured notes in its report.

However, the company notes that both Instagram and Pinterest have seen their growth rate slow down in the past few months. Instagram’s new Web-based photo streams could help it overtake Pinterest and, eventually, Google+.

Simply Measured also finds that Lo-fi is the filter of choice for 14 percent of brands’ filtered photos, followed by Valencia with 12 percent, Rise with 12 percent, Amaro with 11 percent, Hudson with 9 percent, Sierra with 9 percent, X-Pro II with 8 percent and Hefe with 7 percent.

Overall, 40 percent of brand photos use filters, down from 60 percent back in August. Simply Measured notes that filtered photos see slightly better engagement than unfiltered photos.

The report also highlights a noticeable decline in engagement with Instagram photos shared on Twitter right around the time when Twitter Cards support was dropped. Instagram photos shared on Facebook get much more interaction than photos shared on Twitter.

For marketers looking for ways to measure their efforts on Instagram, Curalate has expanded its services beyond Pinterest to offer analytics and tools for Instagram accounts. The platform, the first to convey Instagram and Pinterest data in one dashboard, allows users to track brand images shared by other users, see follower counts and track the success of hashtags in Instagram campaigns, among other things.

In mid-January, Instagram shared that it had 90 million monthly active users, 40 million photos uploaded per day, 8,500 likes per second and 1,000 comments per second.