If it seems like Instagram and Facebook rule the social media world, it’s because they do!
These powerful apps make up the number one and number five social media platforms globally. Moreover, these apps cater to billions of monthly users. So to build your brand online, you need to take advantage of these platforms to find and engage with customers to get your name out there and start making conversions.
What You Need to Know About Instagram Advertising
Instagram is primarily a photo-sharing social media application that allows users to post aesthetically pleasing photos and videos for their followers to “like.” While this is the basic function of the app, it has quickly grown and expanded to include a variety of additional features.
For example, one of Instagram’s best features is Instagram “stories.” This feature allows users to post photos or short videos onto their story for a period of 24 hours before disappearing. Stories are also interactive and can include cool features like quizzes, polls, question and answers, reactions, and more. Furthermore, there’s also Instagram live that allows users to go live and followers to watch and engage with the stream actively.
Instagram often incorporates these different features into different advertising formats. For example, there are story ads, photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, explore ads, IGTV ads, and Instagram shopping ads. These ad types will differ in terms of cost and potential reach depending on the targeting, placement, length, and more.
Instagram is a great platform to advertise on if you’re trying to reach younger demographics like Millennials or Generation Z as 22.8% of the app’s users are between the ages of 18 and 24, and 32.3% of the app’s users are between the ages of 25 and 34.
These numbers translate into an impressive reach when you take into consideration the one billion active monthly users on the app. Furthermore, advertising on Instagram offers low costs per click and low costs per impression — averaging about $0.20 and $6.70, respectively.
What You Need to Know About Facebook Advertising
Facebook is a social media application that allows you to connect and keep up with friends and family by sharing updates, photos, videos, opinions, and more. Like Instagram, Facebook has grown immensely since its inception and now includes a wide variety of features, including Facebook live, Facebook marketplace, Facebook groups, Facebook events, and more.
Also, like Instagram, Facebook incorporates these different features into a variety of different advertising formats, including photos, videos, stories, messenger, carousel, slideshow, collection, and playables.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform with more than 2.8 billion monthly active users. However, the age demographic on this platform tends to skew older, with more people over the age of 34 being active on the app while fewer people under the age of 18 being active on the app.
Which Is Best for Brand Building?
Focusing on either Facebook or Instagram may be better for your brand. But which one? If you’re looking to target younger demographics, then Instagram will probably be the better option.
Also, if you’re looking for higher rates of engagement, Instagram wins there too. However, if you’re looking to engage with local audiences or practice link building, then you may want to focus your marketing efforts on Facebook.
Social Media Advertising Best Practices
Even though social media is definitely a great way to build your brand, you’re not guaranteed success. Instead, this process requires time, effort, and financial investments. That being said, here are some social media advertising best practices when you’re trying to build your brand on the world wide web:
Diversify
Just because one platform may be better than the other for building your specific brand on social media doesn’t mean that you should automatically discount all of the other social media platforms out there.
While you may want to focus a majority of your efforts on the most beneficial channel, you should still diversify your approach and put some amount of time and effort into building your brand across other channels as well.
After all, it’s 2021, and there’s a whole host of other social media platforms out there besides Instagram and Facebook. For example, there’s YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat. These platforms are all different and may require tweaks and adjustments to your marketing strategy to utilize them effectively.
Unify
Although you need to utilize diverse platforms to advertise across social media effectively, you still need to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy that incorporates each different platform and can utilize the unique strengths of each one.
Overall, your different advertising channels should all compliment and play off of one another. For instance, an effective post on Instagram may not be an effective post on Facebook. The same holds true for video platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
At the end of the day, you’re going to want a unified marketing strategy that makes sense for each platform and for your brand goals.
Test
In an ideal world, you would simply be able to post your content and get amazing results right away. In reality, however, we know that this simply doesn’t happen. So instead, you should always test out your content before posting — especially if you’re paying to boost your posts or paying for targeted advertising.
Depending on your budget and resources, you may not be able to invest in legitimate A/B testing. In this case, just make sure to put your content in front of a variety of different people — even just family and friends — to make sure that it makes sense before you launch.
Track
Social media is such a powerful tool for brands due to the valuable insights and metrics it provides. If you choose to ignore this information, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. For instance, you can see engagement on your page and track which posts are successful compared to those that aren’t as successful.
Within your paid advertising campaigns, you can see your click-through rates in addition to a whole host of other information. Use this data to your advantage to optimize your social media strategy across all platforms.
Consult
Clearly, a lot of time, effort, and investment go into social media advertising. These are all limited resources that you definitely don’t want to waste! So in order to get the most bang for your buck in terms of social media advertising, it may make sense for your brand to consult with marketing experts who are well-versed in these different platforms and how to utilize them effectively.
For example, Greg Gillman is a marketing expert who specializes in omnichannel growth strategies for direct-to-consumer brands. He has been able to generate over $4 billion in annual revenue for his clients that include big names like Adidas, Goop, Lunya, Petco, Ring, Theragun, and more.
Final Rundown on Instagram and Facebook
While there may not be a straightforward answer to whether Facebook or Instagram is best for brand building, you can always ask the experts! Greg Gillman is able to do a deep dive into your brand needs and goals to come up with an effective social media strategy tailored specifically to your brand. From there, you can tackle the competition on social and dominate every platform from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and beyond.
Sources:
5 Most Popular Social Media Platforms in 2021 | Insider Monkey
Marketing to Millennials and Generation Z: Things Are Changing | The Drum
