Instagram Continues to Gain on Facebook for Brands, But News Feed Stays Strong

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Despite several gains by Instagram at the expense of its parent company, Facebook’s News Feed still snatches up 60% of overall social media ad spend, according to the recently release Must-Know Social Media Trends second-quarter-2019 report from social marketing platform Socialbakers.

Marketers have increased their overall ad spend on Instagram according to Socialbakers, but Instagram feed accounts for just 20% of total ad spend, while Instagram Stories, Facebook suggested video and Facebook in-stream video combined represent 10%.

The top 50 brands on Instagram now have the same audience size as the top 50 brands on Facebook, but Instagram generates much more user engagement, according to Socialbakers.

Fashion and beauty brands see strong performance from Instagram, while ecommerce and retail brands continue to thrive on Facebook News Feed.

Socialbakers also said interactions on Instagram have remained steady over the past year, while median interactions with Facebook posts are down 3.3% compared with June 2018.

When the top 50,000 brand profiles opted for organic interactions, carousel was the leading format on Instagram, but it was only used 15% to 18% during the second quarter.

Meanwhile, based on an examination of over 140,000 brand profiles, Facebook Live was the social network’s leader in interactions, but it was used in just 4% of posts.

Socialbakers found that influencer marketing on Instagram continues to surge, as posts using the #ad hashtag leaped 33% in the second quarter compared with the year-earlier period. More than 3 million influencer profiles were analyzed.

Finally, if there were any lingering doubts about the industry’s shift to mobile, this statistic should take care of those: Ads were seen on mobile devices 95.1% of the time, versus just 4.9% on desktops.

Socialbakers CEO Yuval Ben-Itzhak said in an email, “The second-quarter-2019 data suggests that marketers that aren’t putting most of their efforts into paid social media optimization, benchmarking and maximizing cross-channel visibility are falling behind. The importance of closely monitoring and optimizing your paid strategy across channels and ad accounts is clear as you delve into the numbers about what’s performing well and where there’s still potential for the future.”