Facebook may have more than twice as many global users as Instagram, but little sister is now the belle of the ball in the eyes of many marketers.
Per SocialBakers’ research released today at the company’s Engage conference in Prague, Czech Republic, brands are getting three times more engagement on Instagram, while celebrities are garnering 3.6 times more via the app, when compared apples-to-apples with Facebook.
To be clear, these figures represent the raw number of likes, shares, comments and other social signals for those two categories—the stats are not adjusted, per-capita figures. While it’s probably not surprising to most social media marketers—who don’t work for media companies, that is—that Instagram yields a greater engagement rate (likes, shares, comments, etc., divided by viewers), it seems remarkable that it’s made such gains in terms of sheer signals.
After all, Instagram has 700 million monthly users, while Facebook has 1.94 billion. Jan Rezab, chairman and founder of SocialBakers, told Adweek prior to his presentation at his company’s headquarters in the Czech Republic’s capital that brands should take note but not overreact.
“I definitely would not advise moving spend away from Facebook—it has too much scale and reach,” Rezab said. “It’s that they should start putting more emphasis on Instagram. Look at it less as just a photos platform and more of a conversion platform play.”
At the same time, for media players, Facebook is still the place to be, generating around four times more engagement than what’s seen on Instagram.
The study looked at hundreds of millions of posts on Facebook and Instagram.
