Social media is a hot topic these days as everything is based on social media. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook are trending and become more popular among the youth. These social media platforms have emerged as a great advertising platforms. Several businesses use these platforms with the help of a to promote/sell their product. Social media platforms have widened the horizon of marketing and have changed the dynamics of marketing a lot. Advertising and marketing are not merely limited to just hoardings now, and it is going beyond that. The credit for the same can go to platforms like Instagram vs Facebook.
Social media marketing is a flexible, financially handy, and useful asset for advertisers, entrepreneurs, and businessmen. It helps to reach the targeted audience, supports deals, expands brand recognition, upgrades conversation rates, increases traffic to your site and even, improves internet search rankings.
At that point, it’s not a surprise that more and more organizations choose to incorporate social media marketing in their advertising strategies.
Although these two platforms are interconnected, they still differ a lot in their offerings, audience, advertising strategies, algorithms, and engagement systems. Before going in-depth about the following, you need to know the statistics of both these platforms in different areas.
Which Is Better For Your Brand? Let’s See The Stats!
FACEBOOK STATISTICS
Approximately 2.8 billion monthly active users reported in the fourth quarter of 2020 financial year. (Facebook)
There were 90 million business pages as of 2018 with 160 million businesses using Facebook as of 2020. (Facebook)
On average, brands post 2.37 times per day. (Hootsuite/We Are Social)
INSTAGRAM STATISTICS
1 billion Instagram users (official statistics), 1.16 billion estimated as of Q3 2020. (Hootsuite/We Are Social).
An Ipsos survey noted that 66 percent people said that they used Instagram to interact with brands deliberately. (Facebook)
In the above study, 53 percent people said that they’d follow a brand on Instagram for content. (Facebook)
Source: Businessofapps
According to the above statistics, Facebook might have more users, but Instagram’s statistics are incredible, especially in terms of engagement. Instagram is a platform which has built itself from scratch only based on letting its user indulge in visual content more than ever. On the other hand, Facebook has established itself as a necessary platform for every small/medium business.
Let’s do an in-depth study of these platforms in terms of marketing.
Facebook Marketing vs Instagram Marketing
Initially, the main motive of the application was to keep people in touch and help them connect with new people. But gradually, it turned into a platform beneficial for businesses too. Having a Facebook page for your business has numerous benefits. Your Facebook page lets you share your business details and the products you sell. You can likewise discuss your staff, history, or some other part of your business that is probably going to pull in Facebook users and make them take interest in what you do.
When you create an account and join Facebook, you can add companions, relatives, and experts to your organization with only a couple of clicks. The main stories are ported into your feed, which is shown in the form of easily readable snippets. For more comprehensive data, you can visit other pages and timelines.
Instagram is a platform for everyone, be it teenagers, artists, or businesses. Instagram stories have an array of potential.
MARKETING ON INSTAGRAM VS FACEBOOK : Which one is better
| Basis of difference | ||
| Year of Launch | Older platform (2004) | Younger (2010) |
| Business oriented | Facebook lets you share your business details and the products you sell | Instagram offers a lot of opportunities for you to post visual content> |
| Target Audience | It allows you to keep an enormous and dynamic organization | Instagram is a platform for everyone, be it teenagers, artists, or businesses |
| Monitoring | It is simple to monitor your contacts and your audience on Facebook | Monitoring is not very simple |
| Feed vs Stories | The main stories are ported into your feed, which is shown in the form of easily readable snippets | Instagram stories stay superior to all others |
| Security | Not as secured as Instagram | Instagram offers an easy way to limit bullying, harassment,and exploitation of any kind and even lets one maintain their privacy with ease |
| User Attraction | For more comprehensive data, you can visit other pages and timelines, comparatively less users are attracted | Visual content, which attracts more users than ever> |
To know which platform is better let us take a look at the algorithm, audience type, and offerings of both platforms.
THE ALGORITHM
A good social media marketing agency ensures that all social media platforms give a wholesome and fulfilling experience as far as Social Media Marketing is concerned. They want you to enjoy the platform, therefore, they have some algorithms to make your experience better.
These algorithms are usually set based on your preferences. They tend to show you the posts and content you like. The same goes – for Facebook and Instagram. However, the algorithm still differs from platform to platform.
- Friends and family: Posts of your family and friends or the people you know personally are set higher than those of brands and business in the news feed.
- Engagement: It refers to how many likes, comments, and shares a post have received in a certain amount of time.
- Provides the opportunity to build a more long-term, interactive platform where you or your social media employees can really engage with your customer base.
It serves as a focused channel for communication. It allows you to answer your customers’ queries, address various issues related to company and policies, announcing promotions and more. - Encouraging engagement: Posts that might relatively induce a conversation are ranked higher than other posts.
- Facebook Page Insights provides robust analytics capabilities for both free and paid posts by gathering important information on your page viewers that allows you to get a better sense of the demographic you’re reaching, which is helpful in determining your best practices and figuring out if you’re targeting the right people for your products.
- Visuals: Posts with Images and texts are ranked higher than text-only posts. As visual posts are more likely to be enjoyed by the users.
- The demotion of bait: Posts that force the user to like, comment and share are usually ranked the lowest by Facebook.
- Promotion is demoted: Posts that aggressively ask a consumer to buy products are demoted.
Facebook’s primary purpose is to keep the platform more personal. Even though the algorithm is not in the favorites of businesses, you can still market your brand by following the guidelines and keeping the Facebook algorithm in mind.
Engagement: How many likes and comments could a post get.
Relevancy: It is taken care of if the post is relevant to the user’s choices or not.
Relationships: The posts from people with whom the user interacts regularly are always ranked higher.
Timeline: Most recent posts are ranked higher on the feed.
Search box: Posts from the profiles that a user searches frequently are ranked higher.
The time is given: The time spent on the post by a user also determines the growth.
Instagram’s algorithm is simple, it works according to the preference of the user and also gives equal opportunity to the business accounts.
TYPE OF AUDIENCE
Facebook and Instagram differ a lot in the audience demographics. As Facebook is one of the oldest social media platforms, it gained a lot of users worldwide. However, even after being a comparatively younger platform, Instagram is growing as fast as it can.
As Facebook gained an enormous amount of popularity as soon as it emerged, it is widely used by both men and women. However, most of the active users are between 28 and 39. Adults in their late twenties and thirties tend to use Facebook.
This is because they were young adults when they first started using Facebook (before 2010), and as the platform is now more handy to them, they tend to use it more often. Facebook also has a wide fanbase of elderly users (above 50) mostly because facebook’s interface is user friendly, and people are easy to find and connect with.
This must give an insight to you that if Facebook is friendly for your business according to the audience or not. If the product you are trying to market is more suitable for these age groups then you should not hold back and make a Facebook page right away, however, if there is even an iota of a chance that your product is not exactly the perfect match of these age groups then you should simply prefer to shift to other platforms.
As we know that Instagram came relatively recently, it is no surprise that it is also the platform with the maximum number of young users. Instagram is like a hub for teenagers and young adults. Its features and its offerings are best suited for people of age groups from 13-22. The most active users of Instagram are between 13 and 19.
The platform is very tempting for people below 25 years of age as it offers them an opportunity to start work as well as use it for their personal use.
If your product is for the younger generations and you know that it will be able to get a young fan base, then Instagram is the place for you.
MOBILE FRIENDLINESS
When you open Facebook on a PC and a mobile phone together, you must notice that there isn’t much of a difference between the user interface. It can be used the same way no matter where it is accessed. This is one of the reasons that it has a larger number of users and that too, late adults because they are more dependent on their laptop/computer screens than they are on their mobile phones.
When it comes to Instagram, you must know that Instagram offers a lot of limits to those who use it on their PC. Instagram does not offer all of its features to PC users and is mainly designed for mobile phones. This is also one of the reasons that it has a younger fanbase.
This clearly shows that while making content for Facebook, you must optimize it according to both PC users and Mobile users but for Instagram, the content must be optimized, according to mobile phones.
FUNCTIONALITY
It’s now time to see how both these platforms work/ function in accordance with the content.
Facebook is generally educational. You can discover things about an organization through its Facebook Page whether it’s business hours, a location, or impending occasions. Facebook truly has consistently centered around text since it’s detail-driven. That is the reason it takes more time to make a profile on Facebook than it does on Instagram. They fill various needs.
Facebook also offers a lot to the user. You can do so much with just a video, post, and messaging. It gives hundreds of opportunities, and it is the platform for all.
Instagram is about moments and lives. Users don’t open Instagram to discover your organization’s business hours or to check whether their friends have been to your store or not. They use Instagram to lock-in. That is the thing that makes it so compelling for building your image and acquiring fame.
Instagram offers a lot but not as much as Facebook does. It is an amazing and fast-growing social media platform, but it is equally difficult to make an image for your business on it.
INSTAGRAM VS FACEBOOK : What Is More Result Oriented Platform For Marketing
To know which platform is better for your business, it is crucial to look into the marketing options they offer to you. Being a best social media marketing company in Delhi, we know how important it is to match your business with the right social media channels depending on your target audience’s interests and the platforms’ advertising potential.
TYPE OF ADS
Facebook offers quite a few types of ads :
- Video ads: Recommended videos with subtitles up to 15 seconds.
- Image ads: A persuasive text with an attractive image.
- Collection ads: A cover photo or gif/video with few product pictures after.
- Slideshow ads: Video-like ads use images, texts, and sounds to convey a message.
- Canvas ads: Mobile-optimized ads.
- Lead generation ads: These ads usually are in the form of a survey or form, and they collect the user’s information.
- Offer ads: These ads permit you to promote discounts and offers on your product.
Instagram does not offer as many adoptions as Facebook does:
- Photo ads: Permit you to promote your product through images/pictures.
- Video ads: These ads have a time limit of about 60 seconds.
- Carousel ads: These ads are posted in multiple post formats, and every post has a CTA link attached.
- Story ads: These are shared through stories in the form of pictures and videos with the target audience.
WHAT IS THE MOST POPULAR PLATFORM?
If we talk about popularity, then it’s evident that Facebook has more users than Instagram. But we must not forget that Instagram is growing, rapidly too. However, a competent digital marketing agency understands that popularity does not account for a factor when it comes to business marketing on these platforms. When selecting a platform to market your product, you must make sure that factors like target audience and budget are congruent with your product type and strategy.
For instance, Instagram has more of a younger audience, while Facebook accounts for most adult users. It is always better to have your marketing strategy planned according to your product’s requirements.