There are more than 33 million Instagram monthly active users in Japan and 1 billion users worldwide. Instagram only had their office in the United States, but they decided to make one of the office in Tokyo fir the first time internationally. But why, Instagram is poring that much energy into users in Tokyo for 2020?
Japanese Instagram users has characteristics.
Instagram’s representative Adam commented clearly “Japanese market is in momentum”. One of the reason is because monthly active user is rapidly growing past few month. There are more than 6 million users compare to this September, which grew significant number in just 2 months.
“To be honest, often times there are things go well outside of Japan but not in Japan. On the other hand, often times things go well in Japan doesn’t work outside of Japan, so it’s great opportunity to understand the nuance while we base in Japan.
One of the example Adam mentioned is the way Japanese use “instagram story“. Basically instagram story is one of the most popular feature that will disappear after 24 hours. According to research, 70% of Japanese teenage users are using only story feature.
Instagram in turning into more private
Last year Instagram started “close friend” feature in story and it became very popular especially in Japan.
“Japanese users like to express themselves under the situation where they have control in and that is one of the reason why they like story feature more than post. I believe this characteristic of Japanese people applies in general not only in social media. ”
Many people are getting tired to keep up with social media and they are being more insecure about what they see and what they post on SNS internationally, but Japanese people tend to like privacy more.
This summer, they put development department in Tokyo and this was the first time they decided to make office outside of the US. They are sending more people to this office from HQ, not only development and marketer, designer, engineer, researcher and more.
They will mainly analyze Japanese users and they are planning to do some tie up with the local government of Tokyo. When you open the instagram app during the campaign, you’ll see the limited version of hashtag stamp “#my tokyo is ___”. This would be the very first for Instagram to do tie-up with local government.
