I remember the early days of Instagram, when it was strictly a mobile app, shortly before it was sold for a billion dollars and the brief time after that. At the time, the Instagram app was exclusive, first to iOS, and then Android devices and I shamelessly confess that it was the principal driver of my shift from Blackberry smartphones to Android smartphones.
All that was a not-too-distant past and I have finally given up on the trend of posting fancy pictures, it gets tiring but what I picked up on was searching Instagram. It’s the primary reason I still use my Instagram app and Instagram has just made things more fun with the new search-enabled instagram.com for web.
Users can now search hashtags, profiles and locations on instagram.com in a viewing experience that is beginning to grow much more congruous with the Instagram mobile app where content is still created on.
A spokesperson for Instagram added, “While Instagram.com is designed to be complementary to the mobile apps, it’s important to the global conversations that happen on Instagram.” Instagram mentioned that their web embeds generate 5.3 billion impressions for them.
Facebook also took this approach for their messenger app by making where you send or receive messages irrelevant, and it really improved the reach of their platform by making chat seamless across all internet devices. Now, Instagram seems set on growing their cross-platform reach in a way users don’t have to think about before using the service.