Facebook vs. Instagram: Where do you best reach your target audience? Facebook has been in the news a lot lately, as people seem to be increasingly ignoring this social medium. The question is how best to reach and activate your target audience now. Since Instagram has grown by 127% over the past 3 years and doesn't seem to have grown yet, this seems like a good alternative. Especially since we see that users show 37x to 300x more engagement with ads on this social medium, but our experiences also show that using Facebook is not so crazy in some cases.
Facebook outgrown, Instagram booming
In absolute numbers, Facebook is still the largest with 10.8 million users, but young people in particular have abandoned the platform over the past 3 years. The number of 15- to 19-year-olds using Facebook has dropped from 88% to 72%. Meanwhile, a fraction more young people use Instagram (73%) and Instagram use is also growing in other age groups (Newcom 2018).
Zooming in on the daily use of young people (15-19 years old) shows that 50% use Instagram daily, while only 43% are still on Facebook daily. This is a steep drop from 2017, when 54% used Facebook daily. While the daily use of Instagram actually grew slightly.
Reach young people & generate engagement:
The fact that young people are easier to reach on Instagram than on Facebook can also be seen in various campaigns. A campaign aimed at reaching as many young people between 13 and 18 years old as possible resulted in 19,000 views in two weeks on Facebook, while we were able to achieve more than 36,000 impressions on Instagram with the same budget. The CPM (cost per 1,000 views) turned out to be 2x higher on Facebook than on Instagram. The unique number of people reached on Instagram was over 12,000, while we only managed to reach just over 7,500 young people on Facebook.
Besides being more economical to reach young people through Instagram, Instagram has another plus: engagement. Of course, reach does not say everything about the effect of a campaign. The engagement generated by ads is perhaps a more important measure of a successful campaign. After all, a like or comment shows that the target audience is interested in your message.
Several studies also show that audiences are much more engaged with brand content on Instagram than on Facebook or other social media. Research by Instagram itself shows that ad recall from ads on Instagram is 2.8x higher than on other social networks.
Independent research by Forrester showed that consumers are 58x more likely to interact with brand content on Instagram than on Facebook. This can be explained by the visual nature of the medium. This is because it is biologically determined that visual content is processed faster by our brain. In addition, we remember it better and it evokes strong emotions. This combination leads to more engagement.
Everything on Instagram? No, definitely not.
What if you primarily want to drive traffic to your website and are less interested in likes? Then the choice for a Facebook campaign is not so bad. In almost all campaigns we see that the target group clicks more easily on Facebook, which means that on average we achieve 4x more clicks on Facebook than on Instagram, with a peak of up to 14x more website clicks depending on the expression and target group. In addition, the cost per click on Facebook is on average 58% lower compared to Instagram.
Why it is that the same target audience clicks less on Instagram remains a mystery. Possibly it is because of the "mood" someone is in on Instagram, compared to Facebook. Facebook is increasingly becoming a news source, where people go to get new information in addition to funny videos. Which makes them more likely to click to an external website.
While on Instagram, people scroll through their timeline to relax and enjoy pretty pictures. Research does show that visitors who come to your site via Instagram stay 192 seconds longer than visitors via other social media. So traffic from Instagram does improve in quality.
Two platforms, two goals
We can say that it depends on your target audience and the purpose of your campaign whether it is best to deploy it through Facebook or Instagram or perhaps both. Despite the growing popularity of Instagram and the fact that the target audience here generally shows more engagement with branded content, it is still best to use Facebook if the main goal of your campaign is to generate website traffic.
This may be different if the youth audience is most important to you. We cannot ignore the fact that they are increasingly difficult to reach on Facebook. For that target group, Instagram is a great alternative. Our job is to use a clear message and attractive content to make them want to click on a link.