There has been a continuous heated debate over years among experts regarding 2 of the phenomenal performing applications Instagram and Facebook for social media marketing by various brands. Undoubtedly since Facebook was launched earlier than Instagram and enjoys a large pool of followers, Instagram has given a big blow to the former for its efficient role in business marketing by many business tycoons. While Facebook enjoys over 2.38 billion active users, Instagram is not far behind with a pool of users over 1 billion monthly active users. With such a great number of active users on both applications, it shouldn’t be surprising to know that the two applications are marketing rivals in the current era.
To further investigate the pros and cons of both applications, let’s go through a brief overview of both applications that will eventually help you know the pros and cons of the individual platform specific to your business idea.
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To your surprise, around 60 million small and big pages of brands on Facebook show its key role in generating revenues. However, only 32% of the followers are actively engaged who share the content, leave comments, and ask questions regularly. On the contrary, Instagram is highly popular among the US-based business companies which constitute about 70.7% that are actively engaged in marketing their products and services while 80% of the active Instagram pages followers do engage with content creators.
Despite the active brand engagement on Instagram, People love sharing, commenting, and viewing different content on Instagram as compared to that of over 8 billion views daily on Facebook. This brings us to the conclusion that it’s good to invest in video ads on Facebook while photo ads on Instagram.
Type of Audience
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Although Facebook lacks public-brands engagement, since it’s an old social media platform in comparison to Instagram, it enjoys more audience than Instagram that can help you to target your desired audience easily which are usually of age ranging between 25-35 years. For Instagram, most of the people that you will find will be of age between 18-34 years constituting both men and women who are not that regularly active as Facebook users.
So if your target audience is young women, it’s better to advertise your brand on Instagram while young men can be reached on both platforms having no significant difference in their number. However, there is a larger proportion of older generations on Facebook than Instagram.
Ease of Use on Mobile
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Among the two applications, Facebook is opened easily on your smartphone, you will observe no such big difference except for the layout that is due to the small screen size of your smartphone. You can conveniently scroll down, create, read, and edit your posts Facebook on both screens. Besides that accessing your messages is also reliable on both desktop and mobile screens. According to reliable research, there are over 95.1% of users access their Facebook profiles on their smartphones, 31.8% on desktop, and only 8.8% using tablets.
On the other hand, Instagram is not a desktop-friendly application as it puts several limitations on users when they log in through a web browser. It doesn’t allow you to easily upload your photos, edit your existing content, and watch Instagram stories. It’s more of a phone application that allows you to instantly share your posts with your friends.
Therefore, to launch any social media campaign on Facebook will require you to optimize your content for mobile usage while Instagram will require you to make all your posts mobile-friendly for better results.
Choice of Putting Ads on Your Posts
Facebook helps you use various types of ads on your posts such as video, image, collection, slideshow, carousel, canvas, lead generation, post engagement, event response, and page likes. On the contrary, Instagram allows only 4 different types of ads such as image, video, carousel, and story ads. But the story doesn’t end there.
Surprisingly Instagram has a 23% better conversion rate for ads than the feed ads that you put on your Facebook and over 78% more users click. In addition, story ads that you invest in on Instagram also help you showcase your talent, creativity, and over-topic opinions (Source: WordStream) . This helps you in advertising for your business products and their services, a variety of application instalments, and lead generation. However, the mechanism of choosing ads is still expensive on both applications. Facebook charges $0.27 per click and $7.19/1000 clicks while Instagram charges $1.41 per click and $7.91/1000 clicks which make them almost equal.
Based on this information about ads and their characteristics, which social media platform should you choose for your business marketing? Well, we would say you should look at the type of your business and what you have to achieve from your campaign.