The Differences between Facebook and Instagram

The two main social networks on the internet are definitely Facebook and Instagram, the ones with a higher number of subscribers and active people. Even if for many things they seem evident, going into the functioning of these two social networks it is interesting to note which are the most relevant differences.
Understanding the differences between Facebook and Instagram can help users (even those who do business and companies) in the choose which one to use, what to post in one or the other and how to interact with other people. With this article let’s try, therefore, to examine the two most popular social media sites and explain how they differ from each other, especially in their main purposes.

What is Facebook?

Facebook has beaten all kinds of competition between social networks and since its inception it has gone from being a tool for keep in touch with friends to a total platform, where you can search for news, comment and share any type of content. Each person can keep a diary of events on Facebook and decide with whom to share them, can publish photos, videos, words and links from external sites and give the “like” to posts shared by friends or even from the pages followed. Facebook is a platform intended for networking and connecting with friends, its main purpose being to stay connected with known people with whom it is also possible to chat via the Messenger.
READ ALSO: Guide to Facebook

What is Instagram?

Instagram was born first of all as a smartphone application for the sharing photos and images. Currently, Intagram also allows you to share videos and post stories, which have become the strong part of the social network. Stories, which are also present on Facebook but are significantly less used, allow you to share special moments and are different from normal posts because they disappear after 24 hours. Instagram has become a fundamental tool for brands, companies and VIPs, because its “engagement”, ie the possibility of reaching interested users, is higher than Facebook.
READ ALSO: Guide to using Instagram

Differences between Facebook and Instagram

The photos

Facebook is a generalist site that allows users to create online profiles, share photos and videos, send messages and stay in touch with friends, family or colleagues on a common platform. Instagram works like Facebook but is primarily a photo sharing application.
If you want to publish photos you can decide to publish them on Facebook or Instagram, with the difference, however, that Instagram is used to share a few well-made photos with the aim of attracting as many views as possible at that time, while on Facebook it is also more suitable to publish entire holiday albums to be kept over time and not necessarily shared to attract likes. Furthermore Instagram requires high-quality photos, which are special and enhanced with photo editing tools. If you don’t have photos to post and if you don’t take the time to make them beautiful, it’s almost pointless to use Instagram (except to see other people’s photos). Instagram isn’t even suitable for posting memes or images made of text, which on Facebook are always very successful in sharing. In other words, if you find a funny image on Google, it can be shared with satisfaction on Facebook, but not on Instagram, where you are asked to post your own photos. Instagram therefore requires you to be unique and creative, unlike Facebook where few contents are unique and original.

I video

Today’s Facebook has become a video platform with the clear intention of competing with Youtube. There is a special section dedicated to videos where you can see the ones with the most likes, the funniest or the most interesting, watching them one after the other. You can then use Facebook to share original videos with no length limits, as long as they respect copyright. On Intagram, however, videos can only be published in short form, in stories with a limit of 15 seconds or in the profile with a limit of 1 minute.
Both platforms then allow you to go into live video taken with the in-app cameras from the smartphone. The difference between Facebook live videos and Instagram videos is that on Facebook the video can remain saved in the profile, thus becoming permanent and leaving it to be commented on even in the following days, on Instagram, however, the live videos disappear after 24 hours. . While live videos on Facebook seem preferable, on the other hand on Instagram, when you go live, a notification is sent to all followers (while on Facebook it only sends it to some friends) and the video is also shown in the stories section. , giving you more chance to be seen.

Sharing of information

When it comes to sharing links, blog posts or other informational content from newspapers or other sources, Facebook works well and gives users full freedom. On Instagram, however, it is always necessary to share an image or photo, under which you can write a free text. Instagram, however, is not made for sharing links, which are completely prevented. It is therefore not possible to share posts from external blogs or web pages on Instagram and external links cannot be published. The only way to share links is to use your own biography, which is the only space on Instagram where external links are clickable. The possibility of creating clickable external links in stories has also been recently added, but this is a function available only for those with more than 10000 followers and verified accounts.
Facebook, which is therefore the best social network for publishing links to sites and blogs, also allows its users to create and plan events and to have a more in-depth biography that includes personal information, work etc. Facebook is also useful for creating ads for things for sale and for joining small groups that don’t exist on Instagram.
An important difference between Facebook and Instagram is also in the re-sharing: on Facebook it is normal to re-share posts and images of others, on Instagram instead this cannot (or rather could not) do. The Instagram account is personal and concerns one’s own activities and not those of others. it’s about you and your business, not everyone else’s content. So don’t fill your feed with other people’s posts.

Groups and Communities on Facebook and Instagram

Although the common goal is content sharing, the two platforms have different approaches to networking. Facebook is made to stay in touch with people you know and this is also true in groups. For example, you can join a group with your fellow students, with work colleagues. Instagram, on the other hand, allows you to follow topics and people who post images about things that interest us such as pets, photography, fashion, movies, women, technology, travel, cooking, etc.
A key difference between Facebook and Instagram it is in the way that it is possible focus only on the topics that interest us. On Facebook there are groups, you can follow interesting pages and famous people, but the news that appears in the stream is about everything. For example, just adding a like to a movie or brand will see all posts about that movie or brand in the main stream, which can get pretty boring. You can also add people who write about things we don’t care about as friends, thus causing even more disturbance in the flow of news. On Instagram, on the other hand, you can follow a certain topic and only see the images on that, with a total filter level. As a consequence of this, we can add another difference on how you should use Instagram to post photos where generalist accounts (those who share always different photos like selfies, food, travel or other) do not like.

Difference between Facebook friends and Instagram followers

In Facebook you can get in touch with other people by asking for their friendship which must be approved. On Instagram, however, there is no need to ask for the approval of a friendship to see what a person publishes, you just need to follow them and become his follower. On Instagram it is however possible to set up a private account and approve the followers who want to see what we publish one by one, a bit like with the approval of the friendship.
As a follower you can see all the photos and images published (unless the account you follow has not published with restrictions) which you can also comment, like or save in your account. Both on Facebook and Instagram you can prevent posts and photos from being visible to everyone, making the accounts private and only visible to friends or approved followers. On Facebook you can create groups of friends, while on Instagram you can only send a photo to a group of friends via the direct message function or Direct.
The way the tags appear it’s similar on Instagram and Facebook, so if you tag someone in a post or photo, it also appears on their profile (unless you’ve blocked the feature in settings). Only if an Instagram account is set as private, if someone tags or mentions this person without them being an approved follower, they won’t even be notified.
Instagram pushes users a lot to post photos, comment and tag for everyone to see, while on Facebook privacy plays a fundamental key for users. This difference makes Instagram a more ad-oriented platform, while Facebook wants regular users to participate without necessarily displaying the things they do.

Mobility for Facebook and Instagram

Unlike Facebook, Instagram relies almost entirely on smartphone apps and even if it is possible to open Instagram on the PC, it is not possible to publish photos from the official website (unless you use tricks to upload photos to Instagram from a PC).

Who are the posts on Facebook and Instagram for?

When posting a photo on Instagram, the interested audience is mainly made up of young people, while Facebook is more used by more mature users, with a higher age. Young people want posts focused on a topic that can be women, men, travel, sports, cooking, dogs or cats, and they get bored of reading news that talks about a little bit of everything. Furthermore, on Instagram there is little space for politics and current news, because it is not a social network made for commenting and discussing these things.

The hashtags

Instagram is all about hashtags, which are keywords with the # symbol. As explained in the past, hashtags can also be used on Facebook, but they still remain rather ridiculous and insignificant today. Hashtags on Instagram, on the other hand, are extremely beneficial because they allow the public to find our images based on keywords and discover us.

Conclusion: Which is better between Facebook and Instagram?

This question, of course, cannot have a single answer: those who want to spread their own photos will prefer Instagram, while those who want to share news and thoughts are better off doing it on Facebook. Instagram is all about photos and videos, it’s an application for smartphones that is based on the current moment, without creating memories. Instagram is clean and clutter-free, there is no risk of scams, you only look at photos of what interests you. Facebook is multifaceted, it allows you to do anything, publish posts and articles from newspapers, create and participate in groups, share photos and videos, view long videos of all kinds, create events, chat with friends, wish birthday and much more. Facebook is for everyone to talk about anything, Instagram, on the other hand, only for those who want to create original content and thus promote a particular and specific passion, a product, a brand, a place or photos of themselves.