Instagram vs Facebook Ads for Business

Did you know that since the beginning of this year, the number of active social media users has passed the 3.8 billion mark?

Once the enormity of these numbers hits you, you realize how social media has become such an essential part of how businesses operate today. The 21st century marketing rules are simple: if you want to survive and flourish, in a sea of brands and companies, you need to up your social media marketing game.

Social media helps increase your reach to potential customers while helping you better connect with your existing customer base. Additionally, it’s a vital means of increasing ROI and brand awareness. The consequence of all this? Increased sales and leads, every business’s dream.

Facebook and Instagram being two of the most widely used platforms, they become the obvious choice when it comes to advertising your business. Further, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and the integrated option to run your Facebook and Instagram ads from the Facebook ads interface makes it even easier for businesses to run their ad campaigns.

Having said that, there are definitive reasons for businesses to compare Instagram vs. Facebook ads both in terms of understanding the nature of the platform, compare the audience reach, ad types, cost of advertisement on the platforms, and more.

Instagram vs. Facebook for Business

While both are greatly used for advertising your business, the set of features that each of these offers are quite different from each other.

Being the older of the two platforms, Facebook wins when it comes to having a greater number of users (a whopping .13 billion daily active users as compared to Instagram’s 500 million monthly active users). With a tag line of “Be Connected,” Facebook does a hell of a job at connecting businesses to their respective customer bases.

Instagram, on the other hand, goes by the motto “ Capture and Share the World’s Moments.” True to this, its focus revolves around image and video sharing.

Instagram vs. Facebook: Which is better for Brand Engagement

The most significant advantage Instagram has over Facebook in terms of marketing is that Instagram has a significantly higher user engagement rate as compared to Facebook.

According to Ecommerce CEO, about 68% of Instagram users engage with brands regularly, while for Facebook, this value is only a measly 32%.

Looking at these numbers, you would expect to get more views, shares, and comments when posting on Instagram rather than on Facebook, right? However, it doesn’t exactly work like that. Because Facebook does so great with videos, video ads posted there to get more views than those posted on Instagram. Meanwhile, pictures on Instagram fare far better than those on Facebook.

Choose Between Facebook or Instagram Based on Your Target Audience

An important factor that goes into deciding what social media you should use to promote and advertise your brand is the demographic you’re targeting. We all have at least one grandparent that uses Facebook, but I doubt you know of any old people.

If your brand is targeted towards a younger demographic, say generation Z and millennials, then your best bet would be Instagram. Known for its youthful image, Instagram’s user base is mainly composed of users under the age of 30, and that too predominantly in the 13-17 year age bracket.

Facebook, on the other hand, caters to an older demographic, the most prominent of which are millennials and baby boomers. The good thing about this is that these generations are more well off than younger users. Therefore, they are more likely to carry through with a purchase.

Instagram Ads vs Facebook Ads

As expected from a platform that’s as well developed as it is, Facebook offers users the option of choosing from the following different types of ads.

Facebook Ad types

Video Ads: These are pretty self-explanatory—they allow you to showcase your product in video format.

Image Ads: these include one captivating picture of your product or service, along with a persuasive caption and usually a link to buy the product.

Collection Ads: A cover image or video followed by a few product photos.

Carousel Ads: this interactive format allows you to showcase up to 10 images (or videos) in a single post, each with its own link.

Slideshow Ads: Using a slide show of photos, you create a video-like ad, which use combines the elements of motion, sound, and text to maximize engagement.

Facebook Instant Experiences/Canvas Ads: one of the most immersive formats on Facebook, Canvas ads allow for a full-screen experience with a mobile-optimized ad that shows all your relevant advertisement data in one place.

Lead Generation Ads: These ads allow businesses to gather user information via a form.

Instagram Ad Types

Instagram, on the other hand, offers more limited types of ads, but if used correctly, these too can lead to high conversion rates.

Photo Ads: These are the regular images that allow you to showcase your products.

Video Ads: These are ads in the video format. A big limitation, though, is that ads can only be up to 60 seconds. So there is an increased pressure to captivate viewers within a minute.

Carousel Ads: These can contain a maximum of 10 images or videos, with each picture/video being linked to the relevant page on your website.

Stories Ads: Now, this is where Instagram truly shines. Stories ads feature full-screen pictures or videos that users can go through by simply tapping them. They give brands a huge capacity for showcasing their creativity and are highly versatile in getting engagement.

Compare Instagram vs. Facebook Advertising Cost

Nothing worthwhile ever comes free, especially not something that you get to reap such huge benefits from. The same is the case with social media advertisements. However, your final cost will also be affected by other variables like

  • Ad objective
  • Bidding type and amount
  • Audience
  • Ad quality
  • Your industry

You can use ADCostly for getting an estimation of the cost of an advertisement campaign. The tool contains massive data collected from various ad campaigns. You can easily determine the approximated cost of ad campaigns. The tool supports Facebook and all its direct advertising channels such as Instagram, Audience network, and messenger.

As you can see from the above screenshot of the dashboard, we’re in the “ADCOST” tab of ADCostly. You can see different filters here, let’s have an understanding of them.

Network: This is the main advertising platform that will be used for cost estimation. Facebook is the network that ADCostly currently supports. However, the availability of the option for the selection of network is surely there to select other networks too, which may be added in the tool later.

Publisher: A publisher is basically an advertising channel related to the selected network. E.g if we take “Google” as a network, the channels can be display, search, shopping, Youtube, and Admob etc. So, in the present case, the direct advertising channels of Facebook include the Facebook app itself, Instagram, Audience network, and messenger.

Category: A category here indicates the type of products that one is going to advertise. You can select gaming apps, non-gaming apps, eCom, B2B Lead generation, web, and page. One thing that is very important here is that for a good estimation of AdCost, you should select your proper category instead of selecting all.

Advanced: This filter covers ad placement, targeting country, and CTA (Call To Action). There are tons of available options in all of these filters, which are enough to get you a more precise estimation of cost. This filter and its subfilters play a very important role in building a perfect strategy.

Date: The date filter is there to select the date range or the number of days. You can select either specific number of days mentioned or you can select a range of days.

After you’ve selected the filters according to your criteria, you can see the results in the form of graphs and charts. Thus, you can add those estimated values of cost per click, click-through rate, and cost per mille in your strategy from this data.

The Top Campaign section of this tool contains data of the best advertising campaigns. All the filters are the same here as mentioned before. This data fetched from this massive database can be used in crafting a great advertising strategy.

FB and insta ad comparison

ADCostly can be used to check which placement is better and which advertising channel can help in this. If the tool shows more conversions via Instagram in your niche, then you should go for it and vice versa for other publishing channels of Facebook.

We hope that this article has helped you in understanding the value that you can add to your strategy by estimating the approximate cost and understanding the difference between the two platforms.

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