Instagram vs Pinterest: What Can Better Help You Build Your Business

Two of the largest platforms, Instagram and Pinterest, are common choices for businesses. Being visually based, they are perfect for showing off and expanding your rising business. Due to a lack of time and resources, it can be difficult to maintain regular updates on both platforms. So, which will bring your business the most attention out of the two: Instagram or Pinterest?

Handling a budding business is daunting on its own already without wondering about advertising it. With the aid of highly popular social media outlets, your advertising can be made both more cheaply and reach a larger-scale audience than what can be done through traditional methods.

As stated before, both are highly visual and picture-based platforms, where millions of photos are uploaded every day. To stand out on both, photos must be visually stunning and aesthetically pleasing. Though, an overall vibe and appearance of the technical art aspects of photos, such as similar color shades, are vital to a successful Pinterest account where “pins” and “mood boards” will be gained and created based on that. Instagram has the advantage of the content being able to vary more in appearance on an account.

In terms of shelf life, Pinterest trumps over Instagram. Your images will circulate around longer and can link to other photos, off-site videos, and your business website, creating an easily accessible chain to more advertisement of your content. Whereas, Instagram has a heavy-handed reliance on hashtags where only the latest and “trendy” content is what will get displayed. Knowledge of the most commonly searched hashtags is a must for content on Instagram to circulate around more efficiently. Instagram also has the option for uploading photos which Pinterest does not.

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Overall, Instagram is more widely accessed with a larger demographic of people, which is also highly comprised of younger people unlike Pinterest, which tends to have an older demographic. Pinterest also mainly consists of women users, so products geared towards them would work well.  

A downside, though, is that many people who go onto Pinterest use it for DIY- “Do it yourself”, and “How to” ideas, which can quite harm a business looking to sell a product. The whole point of advertising one is to obtain more consumers buying the products being offered. “With people mainly searching for DIY instructions, it can mean that instead of buying the business’ product, they will instead make it or something similar on their own. People on Instagram viewing products are more likely to buy them than to try to recreate or create something similar on their own. Even though, tutorials and DIY are popular on some areas and niches of the platform,” says Jonah Callis, a social media expert at WriteMyX and OriginWritings.

Due to the fact that many of the people who use Pinterest use the platform for DIY projects and the demographic is much smaller in terms of age groups, Instagram would be the best bet for those wanting to start off advertising their business that sells products on a social media platform. The content will reach a larger variation of people and can be broader than what is sought after on Pinterest. Content can also be either images or videos, unlike where Pinterest is just photo-based. Another upside of choosing Instagram is that customers, especially when it comes to the food and restaurant industries, will takes their own photos and post them on their own accounts linking the location to the business. “It will greatly further advertisement as it spreads the interest of consumers with their friends where there is a high chance that more than a few of them will share similar interests, promoting your business,” says Janet Reid, a tech writer at 1 Day 2 Write.

Though, if the business strongly focuses on the teaching of a certain art or trade, or lessons of any sort, Pinterest can be the ideal choice for the advertisement of that specific content. The people who use the platform would be more willing to pay for services in order to learn how to create similar or recreate content that is being advertised and taught by the business. Either way, it ultimately up to the business to decide what platform they are most comfortable with using and displaying their products and or services on.

Margaret Riehle is a recruiting analyst for Academic Brits. She loves to write about the latest trends in business, marketing and communications mostly for various online publications. Margaret also loves researching and doing studies.

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