Instagram announced that its monthly active users (MAU) has hit 400 million, meaning it added 100 million in the last nine months alone, with 80 million photos being shared per day.

Around 75 per cent of its users are from outside the US.

“Among the last 100 million to join, more than half live in Europe and Asia. The countries that added the most Instagrammers include Brazil, Japan and Indonesia,” the company said in a statement.

Facebook-owned Instagram is now well ahead of Twitter, which has around 300 million MAU, and is not satisfied with its growth in audience.

In App Annie’s “all-time worldwide downloads on iOS App Store” chart, Instagram was at number four, while Twitter came in ninth place.

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion but it wasn’t clear how it planned to monetise the app until recently, when Instagram made ads available to more companies and allowed advertisers to run campaigns on the platform, “leveraging the best of Facebook’s ad infrastructure”.

New features for marketers include video ads of up to 30 seconds and marquee, a “premium product” for events like movie premieres and product launches.

According to research firm eMarketer, the company’s ad revenue is forecast to be $1.5 billion in 2016 and $2.8 billion in 2017.