August 17, 2017

The fight for social media supremacy started way back in August 2003 when a little website called MySpace was started by “everyone’s friend” Tom Anderson to rival the then reigning champion, Friendster. The battle between the two social media giants of the early 2000’s ranged on until Mark Zuckerberg and his friends got together at Harvard and started “The” Facebook in February 2004. 10 months later Facebook reached 1 million users and within a few years both MySpace and Friendster were all but gone.

That same fight continues to this day between social media behemoths Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram, but the focus of today’s blog is to look at the battle between Twitter and Instagram, specifically in terms of which social media network makes the most sense for small businesses.

My answer: Instagram. And overwhelmingly so. Here’s 4 reasons why…

1. Instagram’s MAUs Are Growing, Twitter’s Aren’t

MAUs or Monthly Active Users is one of the more telling statistics when it comes to social media growth. An MAU is the number of users on a given social media network who sign-in at least once a month. As you’ll see in the two graphs below, Instagram’s MAUs are still very much on the rise while Twitter’s have been basically flat for the last 6 quarters. This is a really bad sign for Twitter not only when it comes to its growth but also its stock price. Weak MAU growth is a telltale sign that users may be becoming disinterested in a social media network.

2. Twitter Is Rumored to be Selling

It’s never a good thing when the “for sale” sign goes up in the window. While no one from Twitter has officially declared “Twitter is for sale, who’s buyin’?”, many tech websites and industry insiders believe it’s on the market. Selling Twitter to one of the other big tech companies (Google and Verizon have both been rumored to be interested), may actually be a good thing for Twitter, but until that actually happens it doesn’t make sense for your business to invest too much time in the network.

3. Instagram is Easier to Use and Understand

One of the big complaints about Twitter is that many users have a hard time figuring out how it works. Sure millennials were able to pick up Twitter with ease, but most Gen X’ers, Gen Y’ers and baby boomers had no idea how to read a Tweet like this. Instagram on the other hand is very straight forward which makes it not only easy for users to understand but also makes it easier for small businesses to use. You can explain Instagram in just 11 words: take a picture, choose a filter, add a caption and post!

When you realize you're halfway to Friday. 🙌 #HumpDay 📷 : @hannaritland #fossilstyle

A post shared by fossil (@fossil) on Aug 9, 2017 at 12:36pm PDT

4. More Advertising Options Available on Instagram

For those of you who don’t know, Instagram is owned by Facebook. They bought it back in April 2012 for 1 billion dollars which at the time seemed ridiculous but now looks genius. What does that mean? It means that businesses have basically the same advertising options on Instagram as they do on Facebook… and Facebook has a lot of options. Everything from targeting by a gender to demographic to interest to location – it’s all available and it’s available to over 700 million users and growing.