Just look around you. Commuters making their morning journey to work on the trains, the ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ hanging out in kopitiams (Singapore’s colloquial slang for local coffee houses), or even that annoying glare you see in the corner of your eyes when inside a theatre, Facebook is everywhere.
There’s few who would dispute that Facebook is the greatest monolith of social media channels to date, but even fewer recognise that Facebook has evolved into an increasingly passive platform. And by passive, I really mean, that people today are simply scrolling past your post.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that folks out there don’t want to listen to stories – they want to see them.
And that’s where Instagram masterfully excels in – showing mini-stories in the form of pictures (and sometimes short videos). A recent study by Locowise reveals that organic engagement per post on Instagram is at 2.61 per cent, which admittedly, might not seem like much, but is five times that of Facebook’s, which is at a meagre 0.55 per cent. Engagement rates are at 4.21 per cent per follower, which is a staggering 58 times higher than Facebook.
In less than five years, the undisputed king of ‘snap and share’ has crushed the 300 million users milestone to smithereens. This was largely attributed to Instagram being conceived as the anti-thesis of Facebook – staying focussed on visual storytelling and keeping users within the platform, instead of redirecting them to ‘viral’ posts on external sites.
In fact, in the example below, Red Bull pushed out a Facebook post and the exact same Instagram post. A few days later, out of the 43 million Facebook fans, only just 2,600 (a 0.006 per cent likes-per-fan rate) liked the photos, while its 1.2 million Instagram followers had liked the video more than 36,000 times (a three per cent likes-per-follower rate).