Be prepared to see a flood of Facebook photos hitting your timeline in the near future. The recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook for the staggering sum of a billion dollars has resulted in a lot of speculation and scrutinizing. Far be it for us to not join in.
First, it’s important to realize the proliferation of smartphone usage in our daily lives. A survey conducted by The Luxury Institute revealed that more than half of wealthy U.S. consumers own a smartphone. Of those owners, more than 80% have apps that they use on those phones. What is the number one most used app? Well, Facebook, of course.
Instagram’s popularity, and the reason why it drew Facebook’s eyes, is because it latched on to everything that makes apps appealing. It is free. It is social. And it is easy to use.
Interestingly enough, the most popular apps among wealthy smartphone users are for things such as weather, business, and news. Nowhere in that list is photo sharing. Will we see a change in that trend once everyone is introduced to the easy photo sharing of Instagram through Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg sure hopes so.
Orlando itself has its own fare share of Facebook users, many of which fall into that key age group of 18-34 year old users who made Instagram so popular to begin with. The AllFacebook blog reports that many students, including about 15,000 graduates from Rollins College in Winter Park and 128,220 graduates from UCF (30% of which are still local), use Facebook. The purchase of Instagram will no doubt help keep them on the social network giant.