Business, Facebook or Instagram?
My business Facebook or Instagram?
Facebook VS Instagram For Business.
Now, with that said, there’s obviously a few things that I don’t know yet about this business like: who it serves and what kind of business that it’s in and I think really what we’re looking for here is just kind of that general, overarching theme of like which one’s better, Facebook or Instagram and obviously the Devils in the details, there’s new ones here, so there’s going to be very specifics.
So, break down the points of consideration for you to have when you’re looking at Facebook or whether you’re looking at Instagram and essentially, sort of some criteria or a framework that you can apply anytime you’re trying to make a marketing decision for your business so you can give it the highest likelihood of success and make sure that you don’t end up wasting your time money or energy and what I call the marketing wasteland. Essentially, doing marketing in a place where none of your customers or potential customers are active and present on which I see far too often.
So, with all that said, here are some points of consideration on helping you decide whether Facebook or whether Instagram is going to be best for your business. Now, the single most important point here, by far, when it comes to choosing Facebook or when it comes to choosing Instagram or anything else is to really take a good hard look at your ideal customer avatar. Who is that person that you’re trying to serve?
Who’s that perfect client?
or that perfect customer for you and your business?
What are their demographic details: age, gender, income, occupation, all that stuff? Their geographic details: what city, state, province, country, do they live in? and their psychographic details as well, although even on initial kind of platform decision this is less important but still, psychographic details like: attitudes, interests, beliefs, affiliations, all the head stuff that goes into how people think and operate and think like that. So, we’ve got to take a look at all of these, but the one that I really want you to focus on, especially choosing between Facebook and Instagram are those demographic details: age, gender, income and occupation.
Now, the reason I want you to take a look at this is because this is going to help you decide on which platform is going to be best and in fact, thanks to the widely available statistics on different social media platforms, whether we’re talking Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, whatever, you get a pretty clear and really detailed explanation and understanding of what types and different demographics are using which social platforms. For this reason, we can start to say: alright, if they’re over the age of 35, maybe let’s focus in on Facebook and if they’re under 35, maybe let’s go more towards Instagram and kind of put our efforts there.
Now, what’s interesting about this advice and we’ll use the 35-age range right now I’m comfortable with that for where we are today saying over 35 let’s go Facebook under 35 let’s go Instagram, obviously this is going to vary and shift depending on what business and what industry you’re in that’s a pretty good general guideline. That said, this is gonna change and it might change as soon as the next month or the next coming months, because the adoption, statistics of these different platforms, well they change all the time.
They tend to start younger and then they kind of progress upwards we saw the same thing with Facebook when it started way back in the day and it was only for like college kids and then it slowly started to grow. Saw the same thing with Instagram, was only for young kids and then it slowly started to grow and now it’s pretty much ubiquitous and everywhere. Seeing the same thing now with Tik-Tok, this brand-new social media platform.
Essentially, it used to be musically, now it’s tick-tock and it’s starting incredibly young but we’re gonna probably watch this thing start to grow and evolve as well. Alright, so now that you’ve dialed in your demographics, you’ve sort of got that rough idea of me but let’s say you’re on the fence, you still don’t know maybe your kind of in that like 30 to 40 age range, you’re not really sure which way to push one way or another, next thing you want to consider is what industry are you in. Certain industries are gonna lend themselves better to different social media platforms.
Obviously, if you’ve got a very visually appealing or aesthetically pleasing type of industry like food or travel or interior design or anything like that, Instagram is going to be a fantastic place to showcase your results, showcase your work, showcase what your business is all about. On the other hand, if you’ve got say a more traditional or boring or bland type of business or industry, more of those traditional business type industries, well Facebook may be geared more towards you, simply because it’s going to enable you to better communicate in the right context the message behind your business and that’s what’s really important.
You want to make sure that whatever content you’re creating and you’re putting out there, looks like it belongs and looks like it wasn’t just jammed in out of place onto a platform that really looks like it just doesn’t fit in. Alright, the next point that you want to consider Facebook and Instagram well both of these, because they’re at peak kind of saturation, they’ve got mass market appeal, pretty much everybody is using at least Facebook and a lot of people are using Instagram, so it’s important to understand that the way to get your content out there is going to be with a paid strategy.
This is gonna be the same whether we’re talking about Facebook or we’re talking about Instagram the way to get results on the platform now certainly if you want them anytime soon is by using the paid platform aspects of it using advertising to get your content in front of your ideal target market. Now, a couple real quick caveats here and this again could influence which platform you decide to go with if you decide that you’re just gonna swear off paid ads altogether you don’t want to do any advertising, first of all I would say that’s a pretty bad decision but that’s okay that’s up to you if you do want to do organic only, just understand it’s going to take you a lot longer because they are incredibly competitive platforms.
Now, if you do Instagram, then Instagram stories are going to be great you’re gonna want to make sure to share behind the scenes information, the day-to-day stuff of your business and post there frequently and basically, you’re gonna need a lot of content to keep showing up in different people’s phones. When it comes to Facebook, the way to succeed there is is a tactic and a strategy that I get a lot of kickback from but it’s still incredibly effective and it’s using your Facebook personal page. So, when we’re talking about the Facebook, you obviously have your personal page and your personal profile where you can chat with friends and family and all the usual stuff that people do on their personal pages and then you’ve got your business page which is dedicated just business.
Well, Facebook has pretty much throttled the reach of your business page because they want you to pay to promote your content, same with Instagram basically Facebook owns Instagram so they’re using the same paid model, same kind of algorithm behind it and they Need that revenue, that’s what their business model is built on. Less so, with the personal profile, because you can’t pay to promote your content so this is a phenomenal way to make sure that your close network of friends and family colleagues of your local area well, they’re familiar with the kinds of services or products that you sell.
Now, when you’re using your personal profile, you don’t need to be spam my or salesy or just push a bunch of stuff out there but it does make sense to talk about what you do, after all you’re probably proud about what you do so, it doesn’t make sense to hide that from them.
Now, if you’re still trying to balance between Facebook and between Instagram and it is important to also understand that they both have very similar features, again, mainly because Facebook bought Instagram years ago, so they’ve adopted many of the highlights of Instagram like stories and brought them over to Facebook and so on. So, both of them have kind of a feed that you can create content for, both of them have a stories feature, both of them have a live availability so you can go live and talk to people on the fly.
One thing that Facebook does have that’s an edge over Instagram is Facebook does have groups, so if you want to build a community or a tribe or a group around your business or industry your area even, Facebook’s obviously going to be the area that you want to push people to. Another thing that’s really worth considering and yet far too few people talk about is what kind of content do you like creating, cuz this is going to be important in regards to staying consistent. After all, you can’t simply throw up a post whether on the Instagram or on Facebook, and just leave it, just say that’s it I’m done I’ve marketed on Facebook, I’ve marketed on Instagram my work here is over.
No, you’re gonna need that steady and consistent supply and stream of content of information of touch points with your customers of staying available staying relevant and staying top of mind by being in their feeds this is why it’s really important to sort of take a look at the overall aesthetic of Instagram and of Facebook and see hello which one fits better with your style, your personality and the kind of content you want to create. If you want to do just text-based posts, obviously we’re gonna want to push you more towards Facebook.
If you to do just image-based posts and maybe have just a real quick caption, obviously Instagram is gonna be better here. Both of them kind of work well with video, so kind of your choice there if one is going to be better off for you than the other but essentially if you’re really tech savvy go Facebook really image-heavy go Instagram video heavy yeah you kind of pick and choose whichever you like and this other point kind of ties in to the one we just talked about of which kind of content do you like to create well at the end of the day is really what platform do you prefer.
If you’ve identified that your market is say specifically on Instagram well then you don’t really get a choice, you have to go to Instagram same with Facebook if you’ve identified that Facebook is your main platform, you kind of got to go there But if you’re kind of split, you Don’t really know what to do you don’t want to use them both, you really just want to focus in on one or the other, well just take a look at the platforms, maybe try them out for a few weeks a few months and see which one you get better results from and you enjoy more and then put more effort there, really kind of build that solid foundation and you can always branch out later.
