Marketing your Business: Instagram or Facebook?
In 2020, social media is undoubtedly an important tool for establishing your business’s online presence. While Facebook has been around for longer and has the largest user base, Instagram has also become hugely popular in recent years. Promoting your business on either platform can be effective, but using the same strategy for both platforms may not be the best way to go.
Instagram is newer and designed primarily for use on a smartphone so it’s no shock that active Instagram users tend to be younger than those on Facebook. Depending on the demographic you are trying to attract, one platform may be more suitable for your business to focus on. While Instagram is all about attracting attention with photos, Facebook is a better platform for sharing anything text-heavy. By clicking on a company’s Facebook page, users are also able to immediately see more details about your business such as reviews, hours, and map location. With Instagram, if you have appealing visuals to catch people’s attention, they may check out your profile but will have to go one step further and click a link to visit your website or search up your business to get the information a Facebook page would provide.
When it comes to engagement, Instagram can be quite powerful. Even business pages with thousands of likes on Facebook may struggle to get more than a handful of people engaging with their content. On the other hand, many more accounts actively engage with the content they see on Instagram by liking and commenting. With the “Explore” feature on Instagram, even accounts that don’t follow you can find your content and engage with it. When posting, by selecting popular hashtags related to your content or brand to include in your post caption, interested accounts who are looking under that hashtag can easily come across your content.
PlusROI launched an Instagram page in early May with a strategy to regularly post accessible and educational content related to our services, as well as content to highlight who we are as a company. Developing our page, we prioritized finding accounts to follow that we believe will be interested in our content in order to foster higher engagement. For example, we looked for accounts to follow that may be in the technology industry, may benefit from our services, or who have some commonality with our company – such as being located in beautiful BC, Canada!
In the short time we’ve been on Instagram, we’ve found we’ve consistently been able to get higher engagement on our posts compared to our Facebook page (which we established years ago). Does a “like” or “follow” on Instagram really translate into any benefit for your business? Through our strategic posting and engagement with followers, we’ve already connected with a small business that has now become a client after coming across our profile on Instagram.
Having a presence on both Facebook and Instagram is definitely beneficial in terms of gaining brand recognition but beyond that, offering accessible ways for potential clients to develop an understanding of your business and services will pay off.
Based on our experiences with Instagram, here are some tips we’ve come up with:
- Be strategic when posting – make sure there is a purpose to the content you are sharing. Have a plan for this to make sure you are posting regularly (once or twice a week is plenty).
- Tag your business’s location (for example, Victoria, BC) and select a few hashtags to include in your post that are relevant to your content.
- Tag others in your posts when appropriate – if we’re featuring a client on our page, we’ll make sure to tag their Instagram account in our post so our post will appear on their profile as a tagged photo.
- Engage with your followers, it’s free! like, comment, and don’t be afraid to message your followers.
- Be mindful of accounts you follow that don’t follow you back – they’re not seeing your content so if their content is not of use to you, it is only cluttering your feed.
- Don’t be afraid to try paid promotions, they’re a great way to widen your audience while bringing attention to your page and services.
