The importance of social media in marketing has been well-documented. If you want to market your business online, then you’re going to need to make extensive use of social media, because it’ll help you reach a wider audience and communicate with customers more effectively.
One relatively under-discussed aspect of social media, however, is which platform is best for marketing. Both TikTok and Instagram, for example, are highly popular platforms with huge amounts of users, but one might be more effective than the other in marketing terms. Let’s take a look at whether TikTok or Instagram is better for marketing in 2022.
Engagement
When it comes to engagement – which is one of the most important metrics in terms of social media marketing – there’s one clear winner: TikTok. Loads of engagements happen within the world of TikTok.
The TikTok community is far more engaged than Instagram’s; you’ll find that your followers on TikTok talk to you more often and want to solicit conversation. When your customers engage with your brand, which is important, it means they’re forming a more concrete image of you in their minds, and you’ll likely be at the forefront of their thinking when they’re looking for the service you provide. Instagram engagement is far less prevalent since the platform feels more ephemeral by nature.
Winner: TikTok
Influencer marketing
If you’re looking to work alongside content creators to deliver your brand message, Instagram is where you want to be. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, at the conclusion of 2020, around 97% of brand campaigns included Instagram influencers, with just 7% of those campaigns including TikTok influencers.
It’s clear, then, that Instagram influencers are more…well…influential than those on TikTok, which stands to reason; Instagram’s content strategy is more polished and slick than TikTok’s naturalistic approach, which means that Instagram suits influencer culture more.
Winner: Instagram
Community
If you’re someone who values community in your brand identity – that is, if you’re trying to build what feels like a “family” – then you’ll probably want to prioritize TikTok. Research suggests that viewers spend around three minutes per day more on TikTok than they do on Instagram in a typical session, so it’s clear that TikTok users are more engaged with their platform than Instagram users – after all, videos take longer to view than a simple photo, which you find on Instagram. On Instagram, there’s always the chance that people will simply see your content and move on, but on TikTok, they’re more likely to participate in the community you’re trying to build, on average.
Winner: TikTok
Broad demographics
It’s something of a misconception that TikTok’s user base is entirely Gen Z. While it’s true that TikTok tends to skew younger, its audience is getting older, as will inevitably happen whenever a new social media platform takes the world by storm.
However, it’s definitely fair to say that if targeting broad demographics and age ranges is your priority, then Instagram is still where you want to look, as it still enjoys a broader audience range than TikTok does. For laser-focused marketing, look to TikTok, but if you want your ad campaign to be seen by all and sundry, then Instagram is where you should be looking.
Winner: Instagram
Advertising costs
Of course, if you’re a brand, you need to factor in how much it’s going to cost to create and run your ad campaign – surprisingly, this is something that some brands forget to consider. By and large, it’s cheaper to do so on TikTok than it is on Instagram.
TikTok ads can be run for as low as just $20 per day (which works out at around £14), but Instagram usually costs more due to its relatively higher market share and longer presence in the market – an important area to consider. If you’re looking to run a traditional ad campaign on social media and you don’t want to break the bank, then being on TikTok is definitely the right way to go.
Winner: TikTok
Stories
Instagram’s secret weapon is its Stories feature, which allows you to construct a series of videos and images that you can fit into a narrative. As a brand, you definitely want to be leveraging Stories as much as you can, because it will give your brand a contemporary, current feel that’s hard to achieve with static content creation.
Stories allow you to add filters, annotations, and other elements to your videos and images, thus letting you bring them to life. TikTok doesn’t quite have support for stringing multiple videos together, so this one goes to Instagram.
Winner: Instagram
Viral trends
The vast majority of viral trends that are popular on the internet these days tend to get their start on TikTok, whether it be cosmetics or toys. Whether it’s dance crazes, memes, or anything else that goes viral, it probably originated as a hashtag or a piece of TikTok content.
With that in mind, if you’re looking for your brand to go viral, it’s much more likely to happen if you’re using TikTok to create hashtag challenges or to participate in trends. Of course, sometimes your brand can go viral for the wrong reasons on TikTok, but you know what they say: there’s no such thing as bad publicity – and this is a truth many don’t realize when it comes to branding.
Winner: TikTok
Conclusion
Perhaps the best thing about social marketing is that you don’t really need to make this choice, which is something to consider.
The fact is that you can use both Instagram and TikTok to market your business; creating an account on both of them is free, and it won’t cost you anything to upgrade to a business account either (although you will, of course, need to pay in order to create ad campaigns).
As such, although there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to both Instagram and TikTok as marketing tools, our final recommendation is simply to use both of them in your strategy!
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