Mine's bigger than your's: Instagram now has more users than Twitter

Instagram is now bigger than Facebook - at least according to their CEO. They have 300 million monthly active users to Twitter's 284 million. What's perhaps more noteworthy is that Instagram has added 100 million users in the last 12 months. This rate of growth is certainly impressive, and reflects the trend towards different forms of content creation - people creating more images and videos rather than just text content.

But does size matter?

It is easy to get hung-up on numbers - and different numbers can tell different stories. Yes Instagram has more users than Twitter, but much more content is created and shared on the latter. 500 million Tweets are sent every single day, whereas Instagram's bigger user base only creates 70 millions photos a day.

So is it better to have more users or more content being created? The truth is that both are good, and both are meaningless. In social media - whether you are the network or a brand, many measures of size do not matter. What's most important is that your activity is delivering for your current strategy. So for a brand it may not matter how many Twitter followers you have, but how much social media helps you to reach a new audience (for example).

For Instagram, they are in growth mode. I wrote at the start of 2014 about how imagery will be increasingly important in social media this year and so this had to be the year that Instagram grew - as more people share more photos, they need to be the app that benefits most from this.

By contrast, Twitter, in many markets, is looking to consolidate its position. It wants to increasingly monetise the network and work on improving the experience for users and increasing the volume of content shared and the amount people engage with the site.

So both are bigger and both are better - social media is not a competition for having the most users or the biggest site. It's about different sites doing different jobs, developing in different ways and using different measure to judge success.

The same is true of brands and their digital activities - avoiding potentially meaningless comparisons of size.