Facebook ads or Instagram ads. What is better for eCommerce?

In our days, social media platforms are made for business. we can organize advertising campaigns, promote our goods and services, connect with customers and make deals with other marketers. We can use different types of content (text, visual), mark our posts with specific labels (hashtags) and even schedule our posts in a social media posting calendar. According to the statistics from different online resources, the most popular platforms for advertising are Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook ads and Instagram ads help people to promote their brands, increase leads, expand their audience and just be better than their opponents. However, have you ever thought about which type of advertisements is better for eCommerce. We`ve prepared an article to compare Facebook ads and Instagram ads to find out which social media provides better advertisements.

To identify the best social media platform in this aspect, we will make a research in these three objectives:

1. Reach
2. Engagement
3. Demographics

Reach on Instagram

Instagram has over 800 million monthly active users. With this number of active users, it becomes a very good platform for business and promotion.

There`s also a strong organic reach on it, a quality the network is intentional about perceiving with newer features like the ability to follow hashtags and a part named “Suggestions for you”, where you are able to see posts that your friends have liked.

Reach on Facebook

Facebook is older than Instagram and, as a result, it has a bigger audience – over 2 billion monthly active users. With this point, Facebook becomes the most prioritized social media while talking about reach, so if you want to increase brand visibility without targeting a specific age group, you should choose Facebook.

Also, Facebook gives you a pack of targeting options, so you can set up needed audience settings like location, age, gender, languages and connections. You can also choose detailed targeting and custom audience.

Engagement on Instagram

If we will look back at 2017, we can see that 70,7% of all US businesses were using Instagram.

According to the information from Instagram, 80% of users follow at least one business on Instagram. As of March 2017, 120 million Instagram users visited a website, got directions, called a business or send a direct message to this account.

Engagement on Facebook

Sometimes Facebook engagement from organic posts may change, but you still have a huge pack of the ad targeting opportunities here. With advertisements, you can get very specific about the current sort of engagement that you want to use.

Instagram Demographics

A Pew Research`s study found that Instagram has more female users than male users. According to the study, 31% of women and 24% of men use Instagram on a daily basis.

There is also an interesting fact that Instagram is highly popular between adults in age from 18 to 29. Furthermore, 55% of the total internet users in this group are using Instagram regularly. With this information, we can easily say that Instagram appeals more to a younger audience.

Facebook demographics

The same study from Pew Research found that Facebook attracts adults from all age groups. Again, like on Instagram, Facebook has more female users than male users. The numbers told us that 66% of male users and 77% of female users are working with Facebook. We can also add that 79% of all Internet users between 30- and 49-years old use Facebook. It means that people of all ages can use Facebook.

What platform should we use?

We`ve made some analysis and found out that it will be better for you to start working with both platforms. You will get more impact by running advertising campaign on Facebook and Instagram in one time, because these platforms are easy-in-use, so you won`t face problems while working with the content.