Twit­ter and Face­book may be the behe­moths of the social media world, but star­tups Insta­gram and Tum­blr enjoyed a very agree­able year in 2012, give or take a few banana skins along the way.

Despite dark fore­bod­ings amongst some pun­dits that the social media bub­ble was set to burst (suc­cess sto­ries always seems to attract prophets of doom), Instagram’s stratos­pher­ic rise since its hum­ble 2010 launch is an inspi­ra­tion for every for­ward-look­ing con­tent man­ag­er, social media man­ag­er and com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er.

Instagram’s TOS dis­as­ter was just a wobble

The heart-stop­ping wob­ble induced by its change in terms of ser­vice in Decem­ber has turned out to be nowhere near as bad or as endur­ing the as the New York Post sto­ry which broke it implied.  App­Starts data does show a some­what alarm­ing dip in Insta­gram users in Decem­ber, but it was entire­ly tran­sient and ral­lied back to nor­mal lev­els with­in days.

The bulk of 2012 turned out to be very promis­ing for a start­up ini­ti­at­ed by such a tiny team. Fol­low­ing Facebook’s $1 bil­lion acqui­si­tion in April, Instagram’s user num­bers had sailed passed the 100 mil­lion mark by the fall. It’s set to be one of the first social media star­tups with a prof­itabil­i­ty plan very soon – not bad for a firm that hasn’t even reached its third birth­day yet.

Tumblr’s road to com­mer­cial fame and fortune

Mean­while, Tum­blr has cap­i­tal­ized on its orig­i­nal quirky hip­ster lean­ings and addic­tive ani­mat­ed GIFs to build a very niche base into a now-huge com­mu­ni­ty.  Offer­ings that began as pop­u­lar blogs (like “StuffHip­ster­sHate”) have now attract­ed big book deals, a trend which sug­gests that Tum­blr is well on course to con­vert its dis­tinc­tive con­tent into a decid­ed­ly com­mer­cial venture.

Today, its con­tribut­ing artists have influ­enced pop cul­ture visu­als and con­tem­po­rary fash­ion alike and some, like writer Kel­lie Oxford, found their careers huge­ly enhanced cour­tesy of Tum­blr.  2012 saw the com­pa­ny intro­duce a range of mon­e­ti­za­tion mech­a­nisms along with its first ana­lyt­ics plat­form. It looks like CEO David Karp was right all along when he claimed Tum­blr was an online tal­ent pool and a means to fran­chise dis­cov­ery, a brand which more and more peo­ple would hap­pi­ly to pay to be part of.