Facebook’s Slow Leak & The Rise of Instagram

June 19, 2019 | adminProvare

It’s dominance continues. But for the first time in the last five years, Facebook, the holy grail of social media and social media advertising, is starting to decline. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a massive source for marketing your business, but as the company itself continues to go through changes and public scrutiny, we’ve seen the rise of a smaller super-power, Instagram.

According to the 2019 Social Media Marketing Industry Report conducted by socialmediaexaminer.com, Facebook is starting to lose some ground as the place to be to a site that is 100% focused on pictures and videos and not so much memes of President Trump. So is it time for Mark Zuckerberg and his crew to worry? Nope, because guess who owns Instagram? That’s right, Facebook.

Instagram recently started adding the ability to post videos as long as a traditional TV ad and with that became the “cool” new place to advertise. It’s not bogged down by memes and old posts that your friend Gary liked three days ago. Instagram’s feed continues to be current and relevant to your likes and not someone else’s.

All that has lead to Instagram surpassing Twitter as the second-most used social media platform for business-to-consumer (B2C) advertising and has also increased its market-share by 7% in the business-to-business (B2B) world as well.

Twitter seems to be the biggest loser in all of this, seeing sharp declines in both B2B and B2C. Just four percent of businesses listed Twitter as their most important social platform. As you could imagine, Facebook rules the roost in both at 61%, but LinkedIn is solidly in second place in B2B marketing with 80% of businesses using that platform over just 67% using Twitter.

So what does all this mean and why is it relevant? Well, if you think back to my first blog about being both where your competition is and where they are not…this is case study #1 on not putting all of your eggs into just Facebook’s basket. Instagram is growing rapidly and marketers are noticing. Diversify your social media buy and include other major players like Instagram and LinkedIn. If your share of space on Instagram and LinkedIn is near the bottom or near zero percent, your competition is reading this right now and smiling.