We live in a world of many social media platforms. To be exact, there are more than 60 social media sites today. Of all these social sites, Facebook and Instagram are emerging to be the most popular social sites in place.
Facebook boasts of a massive following going up to the tune of 2 billion people. Instagram follows suit with more than 800 million users. Looking at these huge figures, one would naturally assume Facebook could be the most ideal site for business and social media marketing.
It’s not safe to say that yet as there are many factors that come into play when looking at both social media platforms. This article goes deeper into defining the differences that emerge between the two sites and what site could stand out for business.
Already, there are predictions that Instagram could overtake Facebook in terms of user number. This is more observed in the United States than the rest of the world.
Noticeable differences between Facebook and Instagram
- Branding looks better with Instagram
Both Facebook and Instagram are great sites for branding and social media marketing. However, Facebook seems to make changes to its display algorithms more than often. The resultant effect of these constant changes is that users find it hard gaining organic reach for their brand posts.
Instagram seems to have a different experience and trajectory, however. Even though they make changes to their branding algorithms as well, theirs seems to be less imposing while promoting an overall awesome brand user experience.
Looking at the brands on Instagram, one gets the feeling they resonate well with users compared to other brands on Facebook.
- Engagement
In a study conducted by Forrester in 2015, brands on Instagram had the highest engagement as compared to any other social networking site. The study focused on the engagement of social media users with the top 50 brands globally.
To put it straight, Instagram has more highly engaged users as compared to Facebook. On a typical day, Instagram shares over 95 million videos and photos. These posts translate into 4.2 billion likes on a daily basis.
For business owners and brands, if you are devoid of comments or likes, Instagram can take care of your comments needs. Whether you are busy to post comments or simply void of them, you can use the automatic comments – safe after the update service that is provided by Instagram.
- Instagram turns out to be your mobile friend
From the onset, Instagram was designed to better work with smartphones. That being said, it has a limited array of content that focuses more on images. This undoubtedly makes it a mobile-friendly social site to engage in.
On the contrary, that is not how Facebook began. It was built for the computer user but gradually grew to accommodate the mobile user. In this day and age of social media, one can confidently say that more than 80% of social media information is getting accessed to by mobile phone users.
That is where Instagram takes the lead.
- Instagram is more positive and welcoming
Well, it’s not like Instagram does not have its fair share of challenges. On Instagram, you will find bots and trolls that could mess up your content. Conversely, Facebook doesn’t bring out the same environment. A simple assertiveness and clarity of mind could make you a victim of cyberbullying. Even worse, your personal statements could be misconstrued as carrying some political connotations.
This is not what you will experience on Instagram as it turns out to be more appealing and encouraging. Still, positivity doesn’t look much of a factor to consider when it comes to a social networking experience. You may want to agree with me here but wait a minute, isn’t a social site expected to be fun?
If you were to do a random survey amongst your peers, you will be surprised that many will vouch for Instagram at the expense of Facebook.
- Traffic engagement
If you are looking for a site with a high engagement rate of visitors, Instagram is the place to stop at. It’s not only a good platform for engagement but keeps traffic inflow around longer.
A study by Yopto found out that visitors on Instagram spend an average of 192 seconds. This turns out to be 3 minutes higher than other social platforms that do marketing.
The research also found out that visitors from Instagram stayed 45% longer compared to 40% of visitors from Facebook.
- Instagram comes with better stories integration
The story around social media circles goes that Zuckerberg and friends were inspired by Snapchat’s stories function. This prompted them to create a similar function on Facebook. However, the stories function on Facebook doesn’t just seem to cut it yet.
The interface between Facebook stories and Facebook News Feed does not seem to rhyme well enough. On the contrary, Instagram has now a version of Stories-Instagram Stories that turns out to be better than the one for Snapchat.
With only eight months after its inception, Instagram Stories boast of 40 million users on a daily basis more as compared to Snapchat. Going by the stats provided as at November 2017, Instagram Stories had a whopping 250 million users worldwide.
- Instagram is embracing more developers as compared to Facebook
In the recent past, Facebook has hit international news headlines for the wrong reasons. After it was discovered that some of its user data were leaked to Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm, Facebook chose to go a bit slow about the developer ecosystem.
However, not all is lost for the giant company thanks to added efforts on its affiliate company, Instagram in engaging more followers. More surprising is the news that Instagram users will now be able to make use of stickers and camera effects from third parties.
Instagram is also perceived to be the present and future preferred social network for users. To this end, Instagram users will be allowed to share their stories to the site from other applications such as GoPro and Spotify.
As much as Facebook is the only site that has ubiquity, Instagram is proving to be a better social site too.
