As you may already know, Combin team has participated in CEBIT 2018, Europe’s festival for innovation and digitization that took place in Hannover, Germany. We presented our product, met a lot of awesome people, and learned quite a bit about the technologies of today and how they are going to evolve. We couldn’t wait to share the highlights of the festival and information we learned — news regarding Instagram in particular.

This year’s CEBIT festival was different from the previous ones: more fun and music, more exhibitors, more startups and longer opening time. Over 3000 exhibitors, 200K participants, 2000 presentations and discussions, 100 nations and 70 countries representatives were attending in 2018!

Combin is a young company, so we were considered to be a startup and our application was presented at the Startup Village. We showcased the product presentation at our stand, engaged with many current and potential Combin users and got a lot of useful feedback.

Besides that, we learned a but we learned about Instagram growth direction, the most recent stats and other information from Instagram brand leads.

So what was the main Instagram message on CEBIT 2018?

Nadine Neubauer, Instagram brand development lead and CEBIT Signals conference speaker, asssured us that users will be posting and watching more stories rather than scrolling through the feed and uploading content there. Why? Because stories are fun, casual, interactive and effortless. Instagram users already how to create stories, so they are already in this shift: from one photo in feed to Stories with many chapters of photos, videos, stickers, GIFs, etc.

Instagram believes that we are at the front of the big shift in visual communication.

Instagram shared the latesr MAU info on conference — more than 800M users monthly, 25M businesses and 2M active advertisers. Unbelievable!

Some of the atest stats about Instagram audience

Instagram recommendations on stories creation