Should our business be on Instagram or Snapchat? Or both?
With Instagram and Snapchat becoming increasingly similar, many social media managers find themselves asking these questions.
To help you figure out which platform — Instagram or Snapchat — is more suitable for your business, we decided to analyze the differences between the two platforms. We compared six key aspects of the two platforms:
What we found is this (and you might know it already) is that it greatly depends on your business. Snapchat is great for some business and Instagram for others…and for some, both is the best solution.
But which is the best fit for your business?
Read on to find out…
6 questions to consider
Here’s a list of criteria you could consider when comparing Instagram and Snapchat:
- Are your target audience and customers on the platform?
- Which content type (e.g. stories, images, or videos) suits your business best?
- Do you prefer having a public profile that is easily discoverable and to interact with your followers in public? Or do you prefer a private profile and build close one-to-one relationships with your followers?
- Is your target audience more engaged on Instagram or Snapchat?
- Do you want analytics to measure your performance?
- Do you want to boost existing posts or run ads on the platform?
At Buffer, we choose Instagram over Snapchat (but that’s not necessarily the best more for you).
Here’s how we came to the decision, according to Brian Peters, our Digital Marketing Strategist:
For a long time we were on posting unique content to both Snapchat and Instagram at Buffer.
What we found over time is that the quality of conversations we were having on Instagram with our target audience (marketers and social media managers) was much higher than on Snapchat.
Since we are a small team with limited resources, we decided to post exclusively to Instagram so that we could continue to focus on developing meaningful relationships and creating quality content. Since the decision, we’ve grown our Instagram account by more than 20,000 followers and increased engagement by nearly 300%.
Furthermore, the ability to get in-depth analytics on how our content is performing across our feed, Stories, and Live is a major value-add.
Not to mention the platform is approaching a billion monthly active users!
If you would like to learn more about our comparison of Instagram and Snapchat for businesses, we’ve unpacked our analysis below.
1. Users
Let’s first look at the size of the user base of the two platforms¹.
In terms of active users, more than 400 million people use Instagram daily (and more than 700 million use it monthly). In comparison, 173 million people use Snapchat every day.
In terms of Stories, over 250 million people use Instagram Stories daily. That far exceeds the 173 million people who use Snapchat every day.
This chart by Recode shows the rise of Instagram Stories and the slow growth of Snapchat:
In terms of user growth rate, Instagram has been growing steadily while Snapchat’s growth seems to have slowed down. Here’s how the user growth of the two platforms look like (with the data from Statista):
Note: The graph for Instagram shows monthly active users while the graph for Snapchat shows daily active users. Even though they are different metrics, I believe the number of monthly active users and the number of daily active users correlate with each other.
In 2016, Pew Research Center did a study of the demographics of American users on the most popular social media platforms.
Here are some highlights of their study for Instagram:
- A bigger percentage of women (38 percent) than men (26 percent) in the U.S. use Instagram.
- Instagram is most popular among online Americans between the age of 18 and 29.
- A third of online Americans between the age of 30 and 49 use Instagram.
It seems that Instagram is more popular among women than men and among online Americans below the age of 49 than those above.
On the other hand, Snapchat has a much younger user base.
- Almost 60 percent of the users are under the age of 25.
- People between the age of 18 and 24 forms the bulk of Snapchat’s user base (36 percent).
- Only 15 percent of the users are above the age of 35.
Note: For Instagram, the percentages show the percentage of people in each category that uses Instagram. For example, 59 percent of online American between the age of 18 and 29 use Instagram. For Snapchat, the percentages show the percentage of Snapchat users in each category. For example, 22 percent of Snapchat users are between the age of 13 and 17.
Here are some other interesting insights about Instagram’s and Snapchat’s user bases.
- The most popular topics among young adults on Instagram are fashion/beauty, food, TV/films, hobbies, and music, according to a Facebook survey.
- Instagram users like to follow celebrities, get DIY inspiration, and look at travel photos, according to a Facebook study.
Snapchat
- The majority of Snapchat users (71 percent) use Snapchat only or mostly for peer-to-peer messaging, according to a survey by Defy Media for Variety.
- Nearly 60 percent of interactions on Snapchat are made between close friends, according to a study commissioned by Snap, as reported by Mashable.
- 46 percent of Snapchat users in the U.S. don’t use Instagram, according to App Annie. The percentage is 37 in the U.K.
When deciding between Instagram and Snapchat, I personally think that the user base is the most important. If your target audience is not…
