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New York, NY—Will the child someday eat its parent? It’s happened before (think Target, née Dayton Hudson), and in the case of Instagram and parent Facebook, it’s entirely possible to happen again.

Even in the quick-as-a-flash digital world, Instagram’s rapid growth is making news. It took only two years to amass 150 million monthly users—half the time of Twitter and two years faster than Facebook, according to the most recent Intelligence Report from L2 ThinkTank, which monitors luxury and prestige brands’ digital marketing. L2 puts the user engagement rate for the photo-sharing platform at 15 times that of parent company Facebook’s; the kind of growth potential that makes it easy to see why Facebook bought Instagram in 2012.

Instagram still logs only about one-eighth as many total users as Facebook, so don’t discount the mothership’s influence just yet, but in terms of how actively engaged users are, Instagram can’t be beat. Plus, says L2, teens are migrating away from Facebook and toward Instagram, amping up its street cred and making it a must for any brand that wants to capture tomorrow’s luxury customer while they’re still in their taste-formative years. Indeed, for this audience, a picture is worth a thousand clicks.

Luxury and prestige brands are taking note, says the report. 93% of luxury brands have a presence on Instagram—up from only 63% in July 2013, a scant seven months ago. As a category, jewelry and watches is relatively small on Instagram, but it vastly outranks all others in terms of user engagement. Only hospitality is smaller, and comes even close to jewelry in terms of user engagement.

L2's chart shows the the jewelry and watches category, though small (orange dot) has the highest engagement of any of the major categories on Instagram. Source: L2 ThinkTank

Other photo-sharing platforms are fighting for their space. The best known, of course, is Pinterest, which is arguably in second place behind Instagram in terms of numbers. Other emerging platforms are Vine, a six-second video-sharing platform, and Snapchat, which boasts more photos uploaded than Instagram, but less enviable demographics. Instagram users are slightly older and have higher incomes, which is more appealing to marketers—and as of December 2013 Instagram took direct aim at Snapchat by instituting direct messaging that allows brands to interact with consumers, says L2.

Here are some key Instagram statistics from L2’s report:

• Instagram’s engaged user base is twice the size of Facebook’s. (Engaged user base is calculated as total community size x engagement rate)
• 90% of its users are under 35
• 68% are women
• The average user spends 257 minutes per month on the site and 57% of Instagram users visit every day
• There are 8.500 “likes” per second and 1,000 comments per second on the site; it registers 1.2 billion “likes” every day. 99% of post engagement is through likes.
• The watches and jewelry category has the highest engagement rate on the site.
• 16 billion total photos have been shared to date; the average per day is 15 million.
• Nine out of 10 Instagram video shares occur on Facebook.
• On average, prestige brands post six images per week and 0.38 videos per week. Engagement is still higher with photos than videos; by 1-1/2 times.
• 72% of prestige brands have posted videos on Instagram.

Click here for an easy get-started guide to using Instagram for business.