In August, in the United States, of America, smartphone owners visited Instagram from their phones more frequently and for longer periods than they visited Twitter. This is the first time this has happened.

This is a pretty big deal, and proves just what a success Instagram has been: Twitter had approximately 29 million unique US smartphone-based visitors in August, while Instagram had just under 22 million.

During the same period, Instagram had an average of 7,3 million daily active users, Twitter had 6,9 million. Further to this, the average Instagram user spent 257 minutes accessing the photo-sharing site via mobile device, while the average Twitter user spent 170 minutes viewing by the same method.

It’s now up to Facebook to turn Instagram into an effective moneymaker:

Above all else, it speaks to the ongoing mobile issues of Facebook, now the parent company of Instagram. The massive shift in user traffic to mobile devices is a real thing, and Facebook seems to now hold an asset in the highly popular Instagram. The trick now, however, is to figure out a way to effectively monetise Instagram and the Facebook mobile experience.

Twitter, with its own ad product suite of promoted and paid tweets, seems to have cracked this. The company trumpets its ad business as already lucrative in the two years since its inception, though it has not provided any hard revenue projections to back this up. Current eMarketer projections for Twitter’s 2012 mobile ad revenue, however, put the start-up’s ad products near the top of the heap; eMarketer projects that Twitter will rake in close to $130 million in mobile ad revenue in 2012, nearly doubling that of projections for Facebook, which sit at around $72 million.

And Twitter ascribes most of this success to the mobile nature of the company’s core product. As of June 7, 60 per cent of Twitter’s active users access the service via a mobile device. Twitter says the inherently mobile nature of Twitter increases overall engagement between users and tweets, making it more likely for users to click through on its ad products.

Of course, we have to remember that Instagram is about photographs, and photographs generally have the knack to draw a viewer in for longer periods. Twitter does other stuff, and uses an interface that allows for fast consumption by a user.

Although Twitter missed out on buying Instagram, it has been employing methods of making the platform more media rich:

The introduction of products like Twitter Cards, a proprietary technology that allows outside content publishers to preview off-site content within tweets themselves, making Twitter as a whole more visually stimulating and, above all else, engaging.

Engagement is a good word to remember.

[Source: AllThingsD]