Choosing the Right Social Media Outlet: Instagram vs. Facebook for Advertising
Facebook purchasing Instagram may have just been them stepping on their own toes. Facebook was cool and helpful, until it just wasn’t anymore. Why’s that? Oh right, Instagram was invented.
Since I’ve become accustomed to IG, that is the social media outlet I spend most of my time on. If you’ve read my previous blog post, I talked about how visually pleasing social media needs to be in order to grab attention – that’s Instagram. It’s so fun to just see fun faces and different vacations to keep up with friends and follow people with content you enjoy. Facebook is incredibly bogged down by politics and opinions and words – lots of words.
When it comes to business, it’s important to grab your audience’s attention and I think Instagram is the best way to do that these days. Of course, it does depend on who your audience is, but so many people have began joining IG. The millennial crowd is a major target nowadays as they’re coming into the workforce and becoming adults. And if that’s your most important audience, definitely don’t advertise or spend the majority of your time on Facebook. In the United States alone in 2017, Facebook lost over 2.8 million users under the age of 25 according to eMarketer. I promise you that I, along with many other 20 somethings, would be in the same boat, but we’ve got family members that haven’t jumped on the IG wave that need updates on our lives still.
Whether you’ve grown up on the app or learned from your children, IG is just easier. There’s less going on and more to look at, if that makes sense. According to statista.com, active users on Instagram have jumped 200 million in less than a year. That should be a dead giveaway that you need to spend money and time there – it’s where most people are!
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook can still create leads and bring you business! It’s not a lost cause. But like I said before, you need to know what audience you’re going after before you start choosing one or the other. My advice: create multiple campaigns to use on different outlets to attract the right attention for each audience. You can’t use the same photos/videos/creatives for you 55+ crowd as you would for you 18-25 range! But if you learn what your audiences lean towards, you could easily use all social media outlets to your advantage.
What do you think? Will Instagram be able to push out Facebook as the number one social media outlet to advertise on?
*Data from Business 2 Community and Dream Grow