• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, December 1, 2016

A week just isn’t complete without some bad news for Twitter.

In our latest installment, eMarketer now predicts that, by next year, more marketers will be using Instagram than the troubled tweeting platform.

By 2017, the research firm forecasts, 74.2% of U.S. companies (or at least those with more than 100 employees) will use Instagram for marketing purposes -- markedly more than the 66.2% that will be using Twitter.

If accurate, this will mark a significant shift from this year. By eMarketer’s measure, 66.1% of marketers currently use Twitter, compared to the 53.2% who use Instagram.

Meanwhile, Facebook is also saturated when it comes to marketer usage, eMarketer finds. As such, 85.3% of marketers will use Facebook, this year, and that penetration rate rise only slightly to 85.8%, next year.

YouTube is another player whose usage among marketers is plateauing. This year, 45.6% of domestic companies will use YouTube for marketing purposes, with that figure growing to 48.2% next year.

Overall, 88.9% of U.S. companies will use social networks for marketing purposes, this year.

Twitter, for its part, is still trying to come up with new and interesting ways to engage marketers. For example, it recently began offering native ads to brand partners running mobile app install campaigns on the Twitter Audience Platform.

The program potentially extends campaigns to reach an audience of around 800 million on Twitter and thousands of various apps.

Apps with native ad inventory have been blowing up in recent years. Indeed, the category grew by 251% from the first quarter of 2015 through the first quarter of 2016, according to a recent report from Twitter’s mobile ad server and exchange MoPub.

Further whetting advertisers’ appetites, Twitter has found (via MoPub) that native ads have 220% higher click-through-rates than on their 300x250 counterparts, while 58% of U.S. millennials say that they favor native ads.

Twitter could use the additional ad revenue. Indeed, data recently emerged showing that ad agencies are increasingly bypassing the platform in favor other social networks -- Instagram especially.

Worse yet, eMarketer recently released a forecast suggesting that Snapchat will overtake Twitter in terms of domestic users before the end of the year.