 It was in September this year that Instagram opened up for business in India, allowing brands to advertise on this Facebook owned photo and video sharing social network. Financial and tech analysts are predicting that Instagram's advertising is going to become a billion dollar business by the year 2017 and it's going to soar to 4 billion dollars by 2020. And clearly it's easy to see why, Instagram has more than 400 million users globally. In fact it's giving the mother brand Facebook a tough run for its money. So against this backdrop of the here and now and the future of Instagram, how are marketers in India using it as a tool? Could it actually overtake competition and become a social media advertising titan? Our top story tells into this. On April 9, 2012, Kevin Sistrom and Mike Crager sold their 13% startup Instagram to Facebook. Facebook purchased the photo filter app 18 months after its launch for a whopping 1 billion dollars. Today with 400 million active users per month, Instagram is the second largest social networking platform in the world. While it's still some distance behind its mother brand Facebook which has close to 1.5 billion active users per month, it may not be long before it catches up given that in the past 5 years more than 40 billion photos have been shared on Instagram and 80 million more are uploaded daily. So as it sets up shop in India providing yet another advertising platform, how are Indian marketers looking at Instagram? One of the other factors that works greatly in Instagram's favor is the sure variety of content that is consumed. But given that it is an inherently visual medium, what are the categories that fit in best here? To me the categories that work best on Instagram are food and beverage, travel and hospitality and fashion. So these three categories really lend themselves well to it because of the sure visual appeal that these categories have with them. So in the food and beverage one sees a lot of these brands making quick showing recipes you know or showing how to make some new mocktails right or cocktails. So how do you you know educate people? How do you value add you know with the people out there? While brands in these categories are natural fits for Instagram, there is a host of other companies as well that have been able to leverage this platform well. One such is Grofer, the online grocery shopping app that's quickly integrating its brand with Instagram to beef up its digital spread. We are heavy on digital, we promote ourselves a lot on digital mediums because that's the best medium for us to reach out to the target segment that we have. Instagram behaves in a very different way as compared to other social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and you know other ad networks. We use Instagram mostly for engagement purposes and it has shown pretty good results so far. In fact we were featured on Instagram launch in India purely on the basis that our ROI was really really good on the platform. In fact this is opening up a whole new gamut of opportunities for brands that are intrinsically interactive like dating app truly madly which has been actively creating initiatives to reach out to its target consumer base through Instagram. One of the things that we've done recently is advertising on Instagram and in fact I think we are one of the first few brands in India to do so. What we've done is we've also in addition to being one of the first you also are the first in India to use cinemagraphs which is like moving which is like still images but only a part of the image is moving so it's something that it really like attracts the user so when you're on your Instagram feed you suddenly see this beautiful image of say like a couple having a fun moment and only one part of the image is moving. So cinemagraphs is one of the things that we've employed and it's done really well. Some of our cinemagraphs have gotten over 10,000 likes which is really good for Instagram so that's one of the things and we've actually rolled out a whole campaign based on that and in terms of advertising we've seen like our reach has gone up significantly like I think it's gone up about 13 percent also our cost per install has gone down so it's like what almost like 19 percent less so which is really good for us so we are spending less basically and reaching more people. Looking to expand its options to bring in more users as well as alternate sources of revenue Instagram has upped its video sharing limit to 30 seconds from the earlier 15. This move could well prove to be a game changer for Instagram as brands and advertisers are setting up and taking notice. I think video has become a big part of every social media platform. Facebook is focusing on video Twitter has its own video platform and now Instagram which had 15 seconds has extended it to 30 seconds. Given the length it provides a great storytelling experience for brands using Instagram also Instagram is a part of Facebook so there's a lot of cross traffic that happens across Facebook a lot of Facebook users are now starting to use Instagram and use Instagram to post on Facebook. So clearly that 30 seconds is really valuable and brands will start looking at the Instagram video commercial as the next opportunity for them to promote their products brands portfolio whatever it may be. Like Facebook and Twitter in their early days Instagram seems to be quickly gaining momentum and disrupting the social media space a fact that has not been lost on marketeers. Given this could it soon start claiming a much larger share of the ad spends by. So currently if a brand spends 20 percent of their overall advertising budget on digital and a couple of years back distributed that say between display and search with a little bit left over for social now that mix would be changing and as Instagram offers more robust video solutions then some of that mix might move towards Instagram from YouTube even from mainline television certainly for younger brands with audiences who don't consume content on televisions and look to go online. I think it's just a matter of time before they monetize it to a greater extent and brands look at it in the larger scheme of their media budget.