It’s been a whole year since Instagram rolled out its Snapchat-cloned Stories feature that lets users share ephemeral photos and videos on the service, and today Instagram has shared new data on Stories changing user engagement.
Earlier this summer Instagram shared that its Stories feature has 250 million users. Now Instagram says Stories has also helped increase the amount of time users spend in the app.
Instagram doesn’t provide a year ago comparison but does call the new data an increase.
In addition to users spending more time using the app, Instagram says over half of all business accounts on the service have created Stories in the last month. For businesses, this has helped spark engagement with customers as “one in five organic stories from businesses” leads to a direct message from the customer to the business.
Instagram has also shared some new data points including top location tag (Jakarta, Indonesia tops the list) while #GOODMORNING is the most used hashtag. The Vibrant Location sticker is the most popular sticker on Stories, and the puppy ears effect is the top face filter.
Finally, Instagram is introducing new birthday stickers for Stories as part of the one year anniversary since launch.
Instagram is available for free on the App Store.
