If you have a small business and you want to grow it then the best option for you is to opt for proper marketing. When it comes to marketing your business online, Facebook and Instagram are the two of the best social media platforms having billions of active users worldwide. Here we have done a comparative study showing the best suitable social media platform for your business in 2023.
1. Difference in numbers
When it comes to comparison of Instagram and Facebook, the main aspects are the key statistics of both the social media platforms. While Facebook leads the race in User base count, Instagram’s growth in the recent years is just mind blowing. Facebook has a monthly active user count of around 2.38 billion whereas Instagram has a user count of 1 billion.
96 percent of the facebook users accessed the social media site via their mobile device. There are almost 500 million active Instagram Stories users worldwide on a daily basis. Around 40 percent of the people watch videos on Facebook mostly. 37 percent of active US internet users are present on Instagram.
Around 68% of the total active Instagram users visit this social platform on a daily basis. When it comes to small businesses, 65 million small businesses have a Facebook page. For social media marketing, 83% of the brands use Facebook as their marketing platform, meanwhile 77% of marketers use Instagram on the other hand for marketing of their brand on social media. It can be clearly noticed that Facebook has much higher statistical numbers but the engagement rate of Instagram is extremely high.
2. Audience demographics
When it comes to creating a social media strategy, it can be a very complicated and challenging task. There are certain elements which can really make this process much easier and Audience demographics is the most crucial element among all of them. The major difference in user base of Instagram and facebook is that Instagram has a much younger active user base.
Most of the active users on Instagram belong to the young age group whereas the older ones are mostly inactive. A big part of the Instagram users are under the age group of 30 and many are even in their teens. The main reason behind this massive young audience group is mainly because of the frequent introduction of new trends on this platform.
If your brand is looking for a young audience group, then Instagram is the perfect place for you. When it comes to old audience group, their major advantage is their high income status in comparison to the young audience group. If a brandor company is looking for some heavy investment from the public then they should market their brand on Facebook.
3. Functionality
When comparing Instagram with Facebook, Functionality is a key aspect without which the entire comparison process. The functional model of Instagram is largely based on images or videos whereas Facebook tends to rely more on textual content. Facebook is very information driven, it focuses more on descriptive textual contents rather than simply posting videos or pictures.
You can easily find out a lot about a company from its official facebook page which usually has all the details like its working hours time, address of its office or any information about any upcoming event. Since Facebook focuses more on details, the time taken to create an account on Facebook is much more than that of Instagram. The purpose served by both of these social media platforms is completely different.
People use Instagram to showcase the moments of their lives that they have captured. No one uses Instagram to know about a company or to know about whether their friends have visited your store or not. They mainly use Instagram to engage with the other people. They create engaging short videos with trending Reels songs to entertain and attract users. This is exactly what makes Instagram a very effective place for brand marketing and to gain a lot of popularity among the global audience. Facebook is like that multi-cuisine restaurant that have a lot of options available for the people but instagram is like that restaurant which specializes mainly in one or two dishes.
4. Live Streaming feature
One of the most anticipated and crucial features which is available on both the social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram is the Live Streaming feature. The main reason behind using this feature is different for both the platforms. On Instagram people go Live in for their personal reasons like showing a place where they have visited or to engage with their followers. When it comes to Instagram Live, people love to watch their favorite influencers. If you want to increase the number of people watching, you can choose a paid marketing service that will help you increase Instagram Live viewers at a very affordable price. It is a perfect method to gain reach and promote more brands using your live stream.
On the other hand, Facebook has a lot of communities and pages which act like a marketplace. People go Live there in order to showcase their products and services to their customers and also interact with them. People solely do not use the Live feature on Facebook for business and event promotion many more, but the majority use that for that purpose.
5. Campaigns
Marketing your brand on different social media platforms require a lot of monetary investments and a lot of patience and time. The most integral part of social media marketing is their ad campaigns. In order to grow a brand, you need to run a lot of advertisements. Both Facebook and Instagram provides you the opportunity to run different paid social ad campaigns on their platforms respectively in order to attract a lot of audience to your business who can be your potential customers too.
You can easily track your ROI on these two platforms without facing any kind of hurdle at all. With the help of Sprout, a marketer can easily track organic and paid growth simultaneously. The main fact is that Facebook cannot replace Instagram and Instagram cannot replace Facebook. Both are completely different in nature and the purpose they serve. The biggest challenge for you is that you have to find out yourself, which type of social media platform suits your company and how you can use both these platforms to grow your business.
