Instagram's focus on growing international followership, instead of just targeting people in developed nations with faster internet connection and bigger bank balances, may have already started to yield favorable results.
Since Facebook acquisition, Instagram has seen its users' stats soar to about 700 million monthly active users globally.
Albeit, Snapchat is touted as favored by youth demography, but competition from Instagram is making it harder for Snap to gain foothold in the matured age groups.
While Snapchat grew quickly from its early days, hitting its stride in late 2015 and early 2016, but starting from Q4 2015, growth slowed to 13.8 percent, 14 percent in Q1 2016 and 17.2 percent in Q2 2016 to reach 143 daily active users.
Analytics companies have marked Snapchat low in view counts between 15 percent and 40 percent, even as more users began to shift to Instagram.
With Jumpshot's big data and advanced marketing analytics which tracks anonymized data from 100 million global users across different platforms, Snapchat scored 38.5 percent of new signups globally compared with Instagram’s 61.5 percent in August.
Though, Snap has sought to stay one step ahead of Instagram in terms of new features; created more “Shows” with television networks for its Discover section, and rolled out a Stories Search feature for viewing publicly submitted posts about some topics, among other innovative features, it's still struggling with growth.
Now the question is whether Snapchat can survive Facebook’s onslaught, with the tech giant encroachment on Snap’s best features in its international markets, which has potentially sidelined Snapchat.
