In this episode I'm answering the question: Which one is better for your
business, Facebook or Instagram? Let's get to it! Hey there, Adam Erhart here.
Marketing strategist and welcome to a special consulting call edition of the
Marketing Show. Essentially, been receiving a lot of questions lately, this
one in particular on which one is best for my business Facebook or Instagram?
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, what I want to do in this episode is 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 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 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
you're 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
here is that both, 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 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 spammy 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 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. Alright, so I
hope you found this conversation and the answer to this question valuable. If
you'd like to have a conversation like this about your business I'm gonna put a
link to my work with me page beside this video, which is going to give you a few
different options and opportunities on how we may be able to work together. So,
make sure to check that out now if you're interested. Thanks so much for
watching and I'll catch you next time on The Marketing Show.