Facebook has been the undisputed king of social media for a great deal of time. It was recently overthrown by the music video platform TikTok but it still stands strong with billions of users of its own.
Instagram is one of the most crucial parts of Facebook’s business. While it was always a massive cash generating powerhouse for Facebook, a new report claims that it might just be more profitable than its own parent company, at least in terms of growth over the past few years.
A new report from Socialbakers indicates Instagram has overtaken Facebook in terms of influence. The report is based on the top 50 biggest brands of the world and how much they advertise their content on each platform. It indicates that Instagram Stories saw a 40% boost in advertising revenue due to the exciting amount of opportunities that the platform offers.
While the brands did publish more posts on Facebook, the number of interactions achieved by Facebook was not even close to those scored by Instagram. The report says:
For the first time, the total audience on Instagram surpassed the total audience size on Facebook. Additionally, the total interactions on Instagram were nearly 20 times larger than those on Facebook. So, even though the top 50 brands published more posts on Facebook, the engagement on those posts didn’t reach the numbers that Instagram was able to achieve.
The report also reveals another interesting fact which is that nearly 7 out of 10 videos posted via brands on Facebook were shot in landscape mode (horizontally). However, the data shows that videos recorded in portrait mode (vertically) received a lot more engagement, which is one of the reasons why the engagement on Instagram skyrocketed.
It appears that the effort Facebook put into Instagram to make it into a worthwhile investment ended up working quite well for the social network giant. Instagram was estimated to be worth more than $100 billion in 2019 and it is certain that it will be much more valuable in 2020.
