Instagram is certainly shaping our future. Instagram is supposed to be a treasure house of future memories in the form of short videos and pictures that help us to see what is taking place in the lives of our family, friends and even their communities. Instagram was introduced in 2010 with just a humble objective in mind that is to assist its founders in successfully finding a way of sharing pictures of what actually they were doing.

Once the Instagram got over 25,000 active users in just a single day post its launch, it grew real fast to over 150 million Instagrammers active every day. Today Instagram has 400 million active users every day. However, ever since the Hurricane Sandy that occurred in 2012, the founders understood that the users would be reinterpreting the capabilities of Instagram. After the hurricane, everyone was busy posting pictures of damaged cars, massive flooding, uprooted trees and even photos of themselves posing with candles when there was a power outage. The founders were able to understand how Instagram had radically got transformed from a modest moment-sharing application to a robust and powerful tool.

We have witnessed several changes in Instagram since its inception in 2010. Many new features have been introduced rapidly in the app since 2016 onwards. As Instagram is going through a lot of changes every now and then, marketers are anticipating a few more changes in the current year. According to some social media gurus, Instagram is heading towards a number of changes and here are some of the predictions you should be looking forward to.

Much Improved Instagram User Experience & Analytics Data

Currently, there are more than 48 percent of brands present on Instagram. This is forecasted to shoot up to over 70 percent in the current year. Instagram is a mandatory app for businesses; it is hyper-focused and determined towards enhancing its analytics and the ads in the current year. It is predicted that Instagram mobile advertising revenues would be reaching $2.81 billion. By offering much-enhanced analytics tools, Instagram would be focusing on guaranteeing easy-to- use and uncomplicated experience for the business owners in general irrespective of their experience in Instagram Analytics.

You Could Save Instagram Live Video for 24 hours

Instagram stories would be getting increased filter choices, more links that are clickable and a smart integration with Boomerang and Hyperlapse. If you want followers for Instagram then this is good news for you. Saving drafts would become even more competent by including the capacity for storing drafts in some organized subfolders. This could be a wonderful opportunity for owners of business.  Moreover, the reply feature would be much enhanced and placed under the original or unique comment.

Instagram Beats Snapchat

A trend that has been building up over a few months now and one that is here to stay is that Instagram is hogging a lot of Snapchat’s market share. Snapchat Stories is a feature that gives any of your followers a look into your life and business, but Instagram’s equivalent, Instastories offers so much more, integrated into a single platform. Snapchat has always faced criticism related to UI/UX design, one of the prime complaints being the learning curve, how difficult it is to connect with people and how poorly organized the various features are. On the other hand, Instagram allows seamless connection with Facebook and easy searching too. You can share your posts on Facebook automatically through Instagram as well.

This is why Instagram is a great tool for online marketing. For someone starting off, it could be hard trying to get traction on multiple platforms because it is both effort and resource-intensive. Instead, you could use Instagram and Instastories and leverage all the diversity they offer, thus providing useful yet endearing content to your followers and building connections with them.

Conclusion

We have so far discussed many forecasts by experts about Instagram. However, another interesting prediction is that user-generated content would be more popular in 2018. During the current year, there would be a sure shift towards user-generated content. Several brands including those in tourism would be exploring fan content through community driven campaigns. Prepare yourself for more changes in Instagram during the current year. Instagram is all set to make several interesting changes for its users by the end of 2018 and they would be way ahead of the competition