Facebook has around 2.91 billion monthly active users, while Instagram has roughly 1 billion. These make them some of the hottest social media networks. Their intense popularity and large audience size have enticed businesses and marketers to add the two platforms into their marketing strategies.
Social media marketing is a cost-effective, versatile and powerful tool. The platforms enable marketers and small business owners to reach their target audience, increase brand awareness, boost traffic, enhance traffic and conversion rates as well as grow sales. Actually, social media advertising investments have been growing continuously since 2017.
No wonder companies are now spreading their resources across these two sites because they’re not able to identify which platform is superior to the other. Investing in the right platform can give your company tremendous results.
The article will look at the data to establish which of the two platforms is better or whether they should add both of them to their marketing strategy.
Let’s get started.
What They Offer
Facebook and Instagram are both interactive which gives companies remarkable ROI. Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has been growing bigger and better every day. The initial mission of Facebook was to help users stay in touch with friends and family members. Today the platform allows brands to reach their target audience and create awareness about their products and services.
On the other hand, Instagram was launched in 2010 as a home for visual storytelling. People of all kinds are on Instagram, including teens, adults, celebrities, artists, and brands. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 after witnessing its tremendous growth in about 2 years.
Today, both platforms are great for advertising. However, brands and their marketers are interested in knowing which of the two platforms is better or whether they should include both in their social media marketing strategy. The following are the key metrics that they can use to evaluate the two platforms.
Brand Engagement
Facebook has under 3 billion monthly active users. Although the adoption has been slightly slow, Facebook is a leader in the social media space. Further, the platform has more than 60 million Business Pages, and soon Facebook will be the first social network to hit the 3 billion monthly users. Many users follow or like Facebook Business Page. However, approximately 32% of these engage with these brands regularly by liking, commenting, asking questions, or sharing content.
Instagram has approximately 1.393 billion monthly active users. The majority of these users are below 34 years. Nearly 130 million users visit the platform to find new products. In fact, they click on shopping posts to see the products or services and learn more about them. Most Instagram users feel comfortable interacting with ads or promotional posts. As a result, many brands have Instagram Business profiles that they use for marketing purposes.
Although Instagram may seem to have a higher brand engagement in terms of views, shares, and comments, because of posting different types of ads and content, Facebook has a higher video view. The platform gets over 8 billion video views each day, showing that the platform has a reasonable brand engagement. On the other hand, Instagram is an incredible platform for images.
Therefore, brands can invest in photo ads on Instagram and video ads on Facebook to derive maximum benefit from the two social media networks.
Audience
Generally, Facebook has an enormous audience globally, and because it has been around for some years, the platform has gained the largest popularity. Both men and women are active on Facebook. However, men aged 25-34 are the most active users on this platform.
Instagram has a smaller audience compared to Facebook, but there is no specific age group or gender that is more active on the platform. Its users are aged between 18 and 34 years and are all equally active on Instagram. Businesses whose target audience is women in Generation Z and millennials can advertise more on Instagram using photos.
However, much older generations are not very active on these networks, although they prefer Facebook more than Instagram.
Types of Ads
Facebook has different types of ads, as shown on the Facebook Ads Guide. Some of the popular types of ads on Facebook include video ads, image ads, collection ads, slideshow ads, carousel ads, lead generation ads, canvas ads, offer ads, event response ads, post engagement ads, and page likes. Choose the most engaging ads, allows creativity, and give a remarkable ROI.
On the other hand, Instagram doesn’t offer a wide variety of ads. Some of the popular ads are photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, and stories ads. Even though this platform has fewer ads, its stories ads has a higher conversion rate and more clicks compared to Facebook feed Ads.
These ads allow creativity and are versatile thus. You can launch several types of campaigns such as app installs, brand awareness, traffic for clicks, lead generation, and drive sales.
Whether to advertise on Facebook or Instagram depends on what you want to achieve as a brand. You can research more about these types of ads and then invest in those aligned with your marketing strategy.
Costs
Social media marketing campaigns are costly, no matter the platform. On average, Facebook cost-per-click (CPC) is $0.97 across industries. The CPC based on campaign objectives ranges between $0.25 and $3.30. The average cost-per-impressions (CPM) across industries is $11.54 and $2.00 to $30.97 by the campaign.
The following factors influence the cost of these ads.
- Ad objective
- Ad quality
- Audience
- Industry
- Bidding type and amount
Running marketing campaigns on Facebook, a brand may end up paying more than they anticipated
On the other hand, the cost of advertising on Instagram ranges between $0.20 and $6.70 based on the bidding model. The CPM is $0.20 to $2 per click, while the CPM is $6.70. Audience and ad feedback are some of the factors that influence.
The cost of advertising on both platforms is high, but their ROI is equally impressive. Choosing relevant ads can help you reach your target audience on a reasonable budget.
The following tips will help run a social media campaign within your budget.
- Don’t invest in all ads; instead, invest in those that best fit your marketing strategy
- Ensure that every ad you create has met a specific purpose
- Social media advertising is an investment, and so you shouldn’t handle it like a cost
- Choose your audience properly and zero in on that
- Include hashtags in your social media marketing
- Create quality videos, pictures, and images of your products
User Friendliness
Facebook is user-friendly and perfectly optimized for any device. The only difference between accessing the platform on a mobile app and web browser is the overall design and layout. Generally, smartphones have smaller screens compared to laptops and PCs. However, you can create your posts or read other posts, access messenger, and much more on both devices. Brands using Facebook must optimize their content for mobile usage because nearly 95.1% of active users use smartphones and tablets to check activities on Facebook.
On the other hand, Instagram lacks a good desktop experience because of its many limitations on web browsers. The platform is designed predominately for smartphone users who want to instantly share their interesting or funny moments with their friends and family. Therefore brands must do their ads via an app because fewer people access it on laptops and PCs.
Conclusion
The social media platforms have a lot to offer, plus they have a high ROI. So whether to use Facebook or Instagram depends on your social media marketing objectives. Instagram is mobile-friendly because its entire concept shows that the platform was designed to be accessed via smartphone. Facebook has a lot to do to make it mobile-friendly because most users prefer to access social media accounts on their mobile devices.
However, taking advantage of both socials can help brands benefit from different types of ads such as video and image ads. Further, both platforms can help businesses and marketers reach a wider audience, including younger and older generations, thus increasing ad visibility.
Indeed Facebook and Instagram are such a big deal that users look to them as a source of reputable information while brands use them to reach their target audience and boost their sales.
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