• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 2, 2017

A year after its debut, Instagram is having great success with its Stories feature. The Facebook unit is especially enthused about Stories’ popularity among younger users.

Those under 25 spend more than 32 minutes a day on Instagram, on average. Those age 25+ spend more than 24 minutes a day, according to just-released internal figures.

Instagram attributes Stories’ strong showing in part to near constant updates and new tools.

“From stickers to Boomerang, we have rolled out more than 20 new features within Instagram Stories over the past year,” Instagram noted on Wednesday.

Brands are increasingly leaning into Stories, too. Just in the last month, more than 50% of businesses on Instagram posted a Story. Suggesting strong engagement, Instagram also notes that 20% of organic stories from businesses elicit at least one direct message.

When users tag their stories, popular places include Jakarta, Indonesia, São Paulo, Brazil, New York, NY, London, U.K and Madrid, Spain.

When people accompany their Stories with a hashtag, top tags include: #GOODMORNING, #WORK, #GOODNIGHT, #MOOD, #HAPPYBIRTHDAY, #TBT, #LOVE, and #HOME.

If people use slickers, popular pics include Instagram’s “vibrant location” sticker, the digital time sticker and the “Like” sticker. Popular face filters include puppy ears, the sleep mask, bunny ears, love with heart-shaped darts, and koala ears.

Instagram on Wednesday also unveiled birthday and celebration stickers.

For Facebook and Instagram, stealing Snap’s features has proven a successful strategy. Since adding Stories last summer, Instagram has seen the feature embraced by 250 million daily users. That’s up from 200 million since April alone, according to internal figures.

In another Snap-like development, Instagram’s Stories feature recently began letting users share replays of live video for up to 24 hours.

Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that “ephemerality” set Snapchat apart from Instagram and other rival networks.

Facebook increasingly relies on Instagram to drive revenue growth. In fact, the picture-based network will make up 20% of Facebook’s domestic mobile revenue this year -- up from 15%, last year -- according to eMarketer.

Fortunately for Facebook, Instagram recently surpassed 700 million monthly active users, while the network is adding MAUs at a record rate.

As Facebook’s CFO David Wehner recently told analysts: “We’re seeing great growth there.”