Instagram vs Facebook: Which is Better for Your Business?

We are living in a world where mobile dominates, with users spending more time on their smartphones globally. In the same way, many brands and businesses are shifting to digital marketing.

No doubt, social marketing sites are more powerful and bring many opportunities for brands and businesses to engage with customers. But applying the same strategies as others is not always a good idea.

For those who are confused between Instagram and Facebook for business promotion, let’s take a look at which one is better for your business.

•  Instagram vs Facebook by the numbers

With 2.38 monthly billion users, Facebook has redefined the way we look at social networks.

While 96% of active users access via a mobile device, 65 million small businesses have Facebook pages, 83% of marketers use Facebook for their brand’s social strategy and 40% of consumers watch videos on Facebook.

Whereas, Instagram due to its massive success is growing its users base rapidly. With 1 billion active users in minimum time, it’s the fastest growing social media platform of today.

Instagram is used by 77% of marketers for brands’ social strategy, 68% of users visit the platform daily, and 500 million active Instagram daily users.

Therefore, this proves Instagram stats are more impressive than Facebook. While Facebook’s head start can be beneficial in terms of base and popularity, Instagram’s growth is extremely strong and continues to climb.

• Instagram vs Facebook functionality

The way these two social networks are used is one big comparison. Another comparison would be the functions these two apps provide to their users.

Facebook is informational where one can find out many things about a business such as business hours, upcoming events, addresses, and much more.

Therefore, Facebook serves different purposes and is like a restaurant with 50 different options where it may take a longer time to make decisions and take action.

Whereas, Instagram is about engaging customers and this is what makes it an effective platform for building popularity and growing a brand.

It offers multiple different ways of engaging with stories, posts, images, and videos providing a different user experience altogether. Therefore, Instagram is like a burger place that serves two things that prevent the users from getting distracted.

• Instagram vs Facebook by engagement

The main aspect of every successful business is customer engagement. In this case, even a popular post on Facebook has less engagement than Instagram.

Facebook has a user engagement rate of 0.9% per post, whereas Instagram has 1.60% user engagement per post. This is where it gets clear as to how Instagram is more beneficial for business growth.

There are a variety of factors based on which users interact with brands and businesses. Instagram wins here too as it does not provide text information like Facebook, rather provides more valuable images or videos about its business which gives customers a real feel.

• Instagram vs Facebook mobile and commerce friendliness

Instagram is better than Facebook when it comes to the mobile experience. Even though Facebook has come a long way, Instagram is still made for the phone.

Even though direct commerce on Facebook has gained modest success, eCommerce on Instagram feels a very natural extension of the platform. Therefore, the experience keeps on going better.

Final Words

However, even though Instagram isn’t a replacement for Facebook nor Facebook can replace Instagram. But it is clear from the above points that Instagram is a more positive place than Facebook when you compare them both from today’s marketing point of view. 

No matter which social platform you use, in the end, the question remains what type of content do you publish? Thus, focus on your targeted audiences and such platforms will be a bonus point for your business growth in the future.