Instagram has a lot to be thankful for after this Thanksgiving.
Users of the photo sharing service on Thursday uploaded more than 10 million photos with captions that included Thanksgiving-themed words. According to an Instagram blog post, for several hours on Thanksgiving more than 200 photos a second were being uploaded, making it the app’s busiest day so far, and twice the action the service usually gets.
While those are big numbers, it’s nothing compared to the 300 million photos people upload to Facebook every day. Facebook, obviously knowing a thing or two about the popularity of photos on social networks, bought Instagram earlier this year.
Instagram has recently enjoyed a huge spike in popularity with mobile users.
It went from 886,000 daily mobile users in March to 4,589,000 in June and 7,302,000 in August, which actually was more users than Twitter had during the same period, only 6.8 million users. According to the online analytics firm comScore, Instagram’s increase in users was nearly an 8.5-fold jump.
That’s not to say Twitter is falling out of favor — its number of daily active mobile users during the same six-month time period was up 24 percent.
The bottom line: People increasingly love sharing to social networks using their mobile devices.
“Whether celebrating with friends and family or sharing photos with them halfway across the globe, we’re excited to see the intimacy and immediacy of the Instagram experience bring us all closer together over this holiday season,” Instagram said.