Ads on social media provide marketers with more advanced targeting options for the audience and trustworthy conversions for tracking. Although the platform of Facebook is elder and contains the bigger user base (around 2 billion active users every month by Sept 30, 2017, as compared to 800 million active users of Instagram), Instagram is gaining fame steadily, particularly with a heavy adoption of the new features such as Instagram stories.
If you have an active brand on both Instagram and Facebook, the finest approach is starting activating campaigns using both networks on a stepwise basis.
The marketers must consider the seasonal shopping occasions and regarding how to leverage Instagram and Facebook for driving online as well as in-store sales all the year. However, with the tight or fixed marketing budget for social media, you may require to ask a question yourself: where should you devote a bulk of the ad dollars you have; Instagram or Facebook? The answer is determined by recognizing which network can bring in the highest revenue.
For identifying the finest platform on social media for the e-commerce business, investigate the following three important and main objectives:
- Reach
- Demographics
- Engagement
Reach
The reach is simply referred to an amount of the users that you become able to reaching via each of the platforms.
Here is a brief comparison between the reach of each platform:
While advertising on Instagram, you will be needing access to around 800 million people. Obviously, your ad wouldn’t get seen by each of this person, however, it is a large audience still. A big advantage of using Instagram ads is that it owns a powerful organic reach, and it means that the unpaid content can reach a big portion of such a big audience. Also, the hashtags play a big role in getting reach, as people can follow particular hashtags and use the best site to buy Instagram followers.
As Instagram owns an impressive number of the users, it really can’t be compared with the user base of Facebook (2 billion). An advantage of Facebook ads is that there are a lot of targeting options of Facebook as compared to Instagram. By using Facebook, it is possible to pick the users which you want of seeing the ads depending on the factors like gender, languages, ages and much more detailed targeting features which can exclude certain users for you. You can also get the benefit of the connections like apps, events, pages liked and appeal to your customers by using various tools such as Facebook pixels.
Demographics
The people that use the platform show the demographics. It plays an important role in deciding the platform which is suitable for the business.
The Instagram doesn’t own as many users as there are on Facebook overall, but it is still very commonly used by females as compared to males, having 31% of females and 24% of males on this platform. If you want to target females with the ages between 19 to 29 particularly, then Instagram should be a top priority for sure.
Every age group uses Facebook, as its number shows and 79% of every online user has a Facebook account. Talking about the breakdown amid genders, 66% of females and 77% of females use Facebook.
Engagement
The ways in which users try to or interact with your posts such as likes, comments or shares are referred to as engagement.
While it is very hard to know the numbers on the particulars of user engagement as a whole, it seems quite clear that the brands are searching for ways to get success on Instagram. 3 years ago, just 49% of the US companies were active on Instagram, however, this number reached 71% in one year. Moreover, a lot of big-name companies post on the Instagram account very frequently and buy Instagram comments more as compared to the Facebook account and around 80% of the users follow on business at least, thus obviously Instagram is the greatest avenue for the engagement with the audience.
One thing that everyone knows regarding Facebook engagement is that to get your posts viewed isn’t that easy on Facebook if you don’t pay. The engagement on organic posts is decreasing. But, as mentioned before, ad targeting has become huge on Facebook.
Both, Instagram and Facebook are the great platforms for growing the e-commerce business. Selecting the right platform fully relies on what are your expectations for your campaign. You are needed to find out your expectations as well as the goals for your business campaign. Also, don’t forget that both of these platforms are very subjective and they offer unique features and benefits. A right platform for your business will be that one which suits your needs for your own business.
