Should You Shift Your Marketing Resources from Twitter to Instagram?

The digital marketing profession requires extensive executive decision-making capabilities. Two of the most important decisions that marketers must make are determining which social networks to invest in and how much of their budgets to allocate to those platforms. Smart marketers are starting to recognize that Instagram might be a better bet than Twitter.

Instagram Might Usurp Twitter as a Major Social Marketing Platform

A recent survey by eMarketer illustrated Twitter’s precarious position as a leader in the social media industry. They found that many users are falling out of love with Facebook and the microblogging platform. Many people are migrating to Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms instead.

Of course, Twitter is not closing up shop anytime soon. The platform still has over six times as many new tweets as Instagram has photos each day.

However, Twitter is clearly starting to lose its luster, which shows that Instagram could easily be a better content marketing platform. Some of the reasons Instagram might be more appealing for your business model are listed below and you can learn more on how to make money on IG here.

Ideal Outlet for Reaching Younger Audiences

Younger demographics are more likely to turn to Instagram for content. They are especially likely to use Instagram for news. Only 12% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 24 used Twitter for news content, compared to 26% that said that they preferred to use Instagram.

Much More Nuanced Targeting Options for Advertisements

Many marketers focus solely on creating organic social media content. Unfortunately, relying purely on organic traffic is proving to be more challenging than ever. More marketers are starting to bite the bullet and invest in social media ads to expand their reach.

Marketers have to be more price-conscious when investing in ads. They will quickly discover that their money was not well spent if they can’t capitalize off of highly effective targeting capabilities.

This is an important area where Instagram has an edge over Twitter. Instagram uses the same advertising platform as Facebook. Marketers are able to target users based on many different criteria. Both Twitter and Instagram allow marketers to target hashtags. Instagram also enables targeting based off of:

• Age
• Gender
• Geography
• Income
• Education
• Pictures of interest
• Recent search activity

This is just a small sampling of the targeting options available to Instagram advertisers. They can find dozens of other targeting options. They can also use remarketing to further engage with customers that have already interacted with their brand.

Superior Engagement Rates

Instagram might not have as many new pieces of content as Twitter. However, the content on the platform gets far more engagement. There are a number of reasons for this, such as the option to schedule posts more easily.

Sprout Social has some data on this, which should be very convincing. Instagram marketers will find that 4.21% of their followers engage with their content. Only 0.03% of Twitter followers engage with it.

This means that the engagement rate on Instagram is 140 times higher than Twitter. Even though Twitter has six times as much content, Instagram wins hands-down when it comes to content engagement.

Depth of Messaging Capabilities

Twitter is a microblogging platform where users are limited to posting very brief snippets of content. In the early days of Twitter, users were only allowed to share 140-character messages. Twitter has since expanded the character count, but users are still extremely limited. If you follow users with a lot to say, you have probably noticed that they have to break their messages into multiple tweets. This is not a very effective way of communicating, because their followers often respond to one of the subsequent tweets, which means that other people seeing the message don’t get to see all of the context.

Instagram does not have the same character count restrictions. Users are able to share more detailed messages giving them far more control over the perception of their brand.

Instagram Might be a Vastly Superior Marketing Platform than Twitter

Twitter is one of the oldest social networking sites on the Internet. Instagram is a much younger and marginally smaller competitor. However, Instagram is becoming a more attractive marketing platform for a number of reasons. It dwarfs Twitter in terms of engagement rates and is a better medium for reaching younger audiences. Marketers should take this into consideration when deciding which network to invest their time and resources with.