Instagram vs Facebook – Which One is Better for Your Business in 2021?

by Vishal Sharma on April 27, 2021

Social media presence is a necessity for digital businesses in this era, especially when the global average daily social media usage amounts to 145 minutes.

While 97% of marketers use social media for building brand image; businesses need to quickly understand the importance and role of social media marketing in 2021 and beyond.

Now let’s just talk about the two social media giants-Facebook and Instagram as most of the time marketers aren’t sure which one to rely on.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a startup or an entrepreneur who just stepped into the market, or an enterprise, you must quickly put your best foot forward to decide & learn facts about both, Instagram vs. Facebook marketing.

Both of these platforms are powerful and influential with endless opportunities to engage with potential clients and build a brand image.

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So, let’s take a quick look at both of these platforms and learn the differences and advantages so that you can understand where to focus attention.

Instagram vs. Facebook: Audience Demographics

While Instagram clutches a younger base with a majority of users under 30, businesses striving to target teenagers and younger populations can leverage this social media platform to the fullest.

It has been seen that the younger generation, especially teenagers, are inching towards new platforms that not only offer them out-of-the-box ways to socialize but eventually make them addicted to a particular functionality.

On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t disappoint either. With an audience base of young, adults, and the elderly, Facebook can help businesses target the ones with higher incomes in the diverse parts of the globe.

This can be quite advantageous for brands that are targeting people regardless of their age, profession, and other demographics.

Apart from this, marketers are leveraging social logins to get more specific consumer data that can be further utilized to send personalized content to enhance lead generation.

Instagram vs. Facebook: Functionality

It’s essential to first understand how both of these platforms function. Besides the fact that Instagram is exclusively for video/image sharing, there’s a lot more to discuss.

Talking about Facebook, which is quite an informational platform, you may always find things about individuals, complete information about businesses, business history, and probably about upcoming events.

Moreover, any person can easily get an idea about the services offered by a business, its operational hours, and contact details in a single place.

This is perhaps the reason why it takes a lot more time to create an account on Facebook when compared with Instagram.

So what do we learn here?

Both Instagram and Facebook serve different purposes. People find you on Instagram and follow your business account to get engaged with a brand. While Facebook enables a lot more informational or somehow professional platform that can cater to a large number of audiences with different expectations.

People who use Instagram are well-versed with the fact that they’ll get limited but crisp information that they need in a couple of seconds, which somehow isn’t in the case of Facebook.

Your audience logs in to Facebook to watch videos, stories, new posts, and you can expect they can be engaged in playing games as well.

Instagram vs. Facebook: Brand Engagement

With Facebook having millions of business pages and billions of people, it’s undoubtedly a great platform to market your business.

But besides what it seems, only a few users engage with a brand regularly. This small proportion of the audience leaves comments and even asks questions related to the product and services.

Now, when we look at Instagram, the numbers are slightly higher as compared to Facebook. The engagement and communication rate of consumers is quite bigger.

Although you may be thinking and would have already believed that Instagram has higher brand engagement; things aren’t like that.

As per stats, Facebook has 1.85 billion daily active users (DAU) as of the 2020 fourth quarter report. Surprising, isn’t it? Yet most of the engagement is derived from videos.

Again, don’t just underestimate Instagram yet. Instagram has almost similar stats and the key reason behind engagement is through images.

The idea is crisp, if you wish to share a video for engagement, you can rely on Facebook Ads. On the other hand, the same goes for Instagram Ads in the case of images. But again, it entirely depends on your industry and targeted audience.

Final Thoughts

Social media platforms help you understand what your targeted audience really needs and as a marketer, one can analyze user behavior through these platforms.

When it comes to choosing between Facebook and Instagram, both platforms have their own importance in engaging relevant audiences.

We can’t say Facebook > Instagram or vice-versa. It’s just the fact that as a marketer, one needs to understand its audience and their behavior. This will help in building a winning social media marketing strategy.