• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 22, 2015

Trying to keep young users amused, Instagram is rolling out Boomerang -- a new app that loops 1-second videos.

As its name implies, Boomerang videos don’t just loop forward like you average gif. Rather, they play forward and then in reverse in an endless back-and-forth cycle.

Users simply need to press a button, at which point Boomerang takes a burst of photos and fixes them together into tiny video. Videos can also be captured in portrait or landscape mode.

To keep its competitive edge, Instagram has been quick to adapt to user tastes and test new features. This summer, the popular service even went so far as to break its square-shaped format. That change was inspired by the internal insight that nearly 20% of photos or videos posted to Instagram are not originally in square format. 

The steady release of changes, new features -- and now a new app -- is clearly serving Instagram well.

Indeed, among marketers, Instagram continues to outshine other social networks, young and old. This year, 32.3% of U.S. companies with 100 employees or more will use Instagram for marketing activities, according to recent findings from eMarketer.

That number will jump to 48.8% in 2016, and, by 2017, increase to 70.7% of U.S. companies, eMarketer predicts. Instagram will then overtake Twitter for the first time in terms of popularity among marketers, if the forecast holds out.

Analysts are expecting big things from Instagram. eMarketer now expects that the network’s global mobile ad revenues will reach $2.81 billion -- or about 10% of Facebook's global ad revenues -- by 2017.

If accurate, Instagram will then have higher net mobile display ad revenues than both Google and Twitter. This year alone, Instagram will rack up $595 million in mobile ad revenue around the globe, eMarketer expects.