Facebook vs. Instagram – The Benefits + Drawbacks of Each

The introduction of social media to the business landscape has changed the way we view content creation and marketing best practices. While we recommend utilizing a variety of social media platforms as a part of your marketing strategy, making sure your content and messaging are hitting the correct demographics for each one is crucial. 

Whether you are sharing photos, blog posts, advertisements, or user-generated content, what you post, when you post it, and who you share it with will have a huge impact on the growth of your social media platforms. 

In this post, I’ll provide overviews of Facebook and Instagram plus the benefits and drawbacks of each one. 

Instagram Audience + Features + Drawbacks

If your target audience is 35 and under, Instagram may be the place you’ll thrive. The platform is simple, clean, and easy to navigate. Hashtags, geo-tags, partnerships, and built-in editing tools make it easy to build your brand and grow your following with the click of a few buttons. Although it’s fairly simple to create fresh and interesting content using all of Instagram’s in-app editing features, the platform does have a few drawbacks. 

First off, Instagram focuses on images and short videos, which means that users scroll through their feed quite quickly. In turn, your content must be engaging and aesthetically pleasing in order to capture attention. On a similar note, to hold on to someone’s attention, the caption must also be engaging. This two-step process differs from Facebook, where users on the site generally spend more view-time on each post. 

Facebook Audience + Features + Drawbacks

On Facebook, you can grab the attention of your audience with both photos and words: blogs, videos, lists, click-able links, and multiple graphics. Keep in mind, however, that Facebook users vary greatly in terms of age.

Websites such as statistica.com claim that globally, Facebook has the highest number of users, with the widest age range in comparison to other social media sites. What these resources often fail to mention, is that although most of us have a Facebook account, we aren’t all using it for the purpose of education, shopping, scoping out brands, or even to share news and updates, as many do on Instagram. Instead, a large number of Facebook users are using it solely to log into other websites, to create profiles on dating apps, or to utilize auto-fill for quick check-out when shopping online. The people who are logging into Facebook, scrolling through their feeds, reading articles, and engaging with ads, are typically in the 35 years and above age range. 

If 35+ is your target audience, Facebook is where you want to spend more time and effort! The platform is user-friendly and has a ton of features that you may not even know exist! For example, your business page can host a much wider range of information than Instagram does. Additionally, you can easily share blog posts and news articles from the internet, and videos of any length.

Facebook also makes it fairly simple for users to create ads through its Business Manager and they are much more customizable than ads you can create with the Instagram app! Finally, the majority of other social platforms can link to Facebook, but this cannot always be done in reverse. 

Advice for Both Platforms

Regardless of the social media platform(s), you choose to utilize, the most important things to remember are: post creative and engaging content, post consistently, engage with those who engage with you, and have fun with it!

 

For more information on social media ads, check out our free webinar here. If you’re in need of posting suggestions, check out this article on Top Performing Social Media Post Formats.

Finally, if you have any other questions, please reach out to the Sesame Social Media Team. We’d love to chat with you!

 

—Kai Eldridge, Social Media Specialist, Sesame Communications