Facebook vs Instagram Ads: Choose the right marketing platform
It’s true that Facebook has now reached the grandpa (or grandma) stage when compared to the new home of Gen Zers, Instagram. But it’s also true that it’s still more in use with over 2.7 billion people logging onto Facebook every month (Instagram has around 1 billion of those). So then which platform is the most profitable to advertise from? While we love giving straightforward solutions, unfortunately, there is no single right answer here. It all depends on the kind of business you have, the people you want to target and the social media platforms they prefer. In some cases, promoting your work from both platforms may be the way to go.
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So how to choose?
Think of it this way. When Ross wanted to sell more cookies in F.R.I.E.N.D.S, he started showing up at NYU dorms as the cookie dude. When Joey wanted to sell his entertainment unit, he put up an ad in the newspapers (back when they were a thing for adults). You want your audience to be able to see you. So the first thing to do would be to figure out where your people are. Your website analytics should help you determine your audience’s favourite place to hang out virtually. Apart from this, other factors like advertising cost, user-friendliness, reach etc also play a role in this and should be kept in mind when making a medium choice.
Things to keep in mind
The demographic on Facebook vs on Instagram
Over the years, more and more millennials have moved from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram making it the ‘digital adda’ of teens and young adults. So if your target audience majorly involves this particular age group, Instagram should be your best bet. On the other hand, as per the statistics, the share of middle-aged and senior citizen users has been steadily increasing since 2019. However, Stories and Facebook messenger’s video calling feature has been able to retain some of the young adult population as well. So, if you’re into businesses catering to such homogenous groups, say a boutique, then opting for Facebook might not be such a bad idea.
User-friendliness
Being an Instagram lover myself, it’s quite a bummer that Instagram’s captions don’t allow sharing clickable links or even the option to copy certain texts (like phone numbers). Facebook does offer some amount of freedom in this case which is really useful when trying to make donations. But keeping this drawback aside, there is no denying Instagram’s ease of use with double tapping and finger sensitive ‘swipe’ navigation, reels etc. So try to understand which platform helps support easy navigation for users when they’re looking up your business.
Cost
So one great thing about both of these platforms is that they get quite a decent and diverse traffic everyday. So if you use your hashtags right, you should be able to get a good number of viewers interested in your content and gradually build an audience out of them, without paying anything. But, if you wish to expand further and reach more people, both Facebook and Instagram give you the freedom to decide how much you want to spend on your advertising. So the best thing to do here would be to go for a hit and trial, split your budget and allocate to both platforms. Then as per the performance, choose where you want to spend your money, whether Facebook or Instagram or both.
To sum up
Told you there’s no one right answer. But that’s a good thing. It means if you have appealing content and the willingness to dabble on both networks, you may just get the best of both worlds. So instead of debating over Facebook vs Instagram ads, be open to both. Pictorialise your business to make it Insta-worthy or utilise the longstanding Facebook communities to get your business’s message across.