Instagram is the most popular social media platform in Iran with probably more than 20M users. In this post, we are going to shed light on Instagram’s user behavior in Iran.

Instagram the internet-based photo-sharing social media application took the world by storm in 2010. It only took Instagram two months from its launch to acquire one million registered users and one year for 10M users. Let’s take a look at Instagram’s growth over the years:

• 1 million registered users in December 2010
• 10 million registered users in September 2011
• 80 million registered users in July 2012
• 130 million registered users in June 2013
• 150 million registered users in September 2013
• 300 million registered users in December 2014
• 400 million registered users in September 2015
• 500 million registered users in June 2016
• 600 million registered users in December 2016
• 700 million registered users in April 2017

Note that Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock in March 2012. Basically, after 6 years, Instagram acquired 600M users while Facebook at the beginning of its 6th year anniversary acquired 431M users. As of March 2017, Facebook has 1.94B users.

Most Popular Social Media in Iran

Iran has its own complicated relationship with social media platforms. As you might know, Facebook and Twitter are blocked in Iran by the government, although most of Rouhani’s cabinet members are active on these social media platforms. Instagram is the only popular social media platform that is not blocked in the country.

Currently, there are no concrete statistics regarding Instagram’s users in Iran, but if we take a look at the number of Instagram’s downloads on Cafe Bazaar -the most popular Iranian Android market- we would find out that there are more than 16M downloads. Considering that there are many downloads from Google Play and the fact that there are 6M to 7M iPhones in the country (which most likely have Instagram installed), there should be more than 20M Instagram users inside the country. This makes 2.85% of Instagram’s users Iranians. Considering the 4M to 5M Iranian diaspora, it would definitely reach to 3%.

Instagram, Celebrities and Game of Thrones

There are other parameters to reflect Instagram’s popularity in Iran. If you look at the Iranian celebrities’ pages such as Mahnaz Afshar, the famous Iranian actress you would find that she has 6M followers. In our research, she had the most number of followers on Instagram.

Another interesting Iranian page that we found on Instagram was a page dedicated to Game of Thrones facts. To see how much engagement this original HBO tv series has inside Iran in comparison to the world, it’s enough to say that this page has 108K followers while the official Game of Thrones page has 3.1M. Only that 108K followers inside Iran makes 3.4% of the total fans of Game of Thrones in the globe.

Enough with the fun facts, without any further ado let’s get to the infographic:

TechRasa and NazarBazaar have conducted a questionnaire to find out about the state of Internet and social media usage in Iran. NazarBazaar which is an Iranian market research platform helps businesses define surveys and sets incentives for consumers to answer them. 3,707 Iranians from the age of 18 to 65 have answered our questionnaire; of which 2,829 were men and 878 were women.