I’m actually a fairly recent Instagram convert. For a long time, I put so much energy into Twitter and Facebook and the blog and LinkedIn and Goodreads, and I’m getting kind of tired talking about it all, that I didn’t know if I had it in me to add another trick to my social media marketing repertoire. But, after some friends told me about their success with Instagram and I took a close look at it, I decided to take the leap.
To this point, I’m glad I did. But I’ve been a Twitter shill for several years. If you only have time in your life for one of them to try to market your book, or whatever it is you want to spread the word about, which one should you go with? Here are my impressions on a few categories …
Barriers to Entry
Twitter: They’re high. Rather high. Most of your friends probably aren’t tweeting much. There’s a sometimes complicated language to Twitter that’s unlike any other network. It’s fast paced, and you have to be creative with your writing to keep it under 140 characters. Building your profile is a challenge.
Instagram: Very low. The user base keeps growing, so you almost certainly know a lot of people who use it frequently. You’re not limited in characters. Hashtags are a bit more self explanatory. And anyone can snap a picture. It’s simple and straightforward.
Winner: Instagram
Engagement
Twitter: The challenge, as noted above, is just in connecting with people at first, given that most of your friends probably aren’t tweeting much. So, you’ll have work to do to establish connections, reaching out to people you don’t really know. It’s not always easy. But, once you do connect with those people, you can have real conversations, and legitimate debates on significant topics. You can learn a lot if you open yourself up to it.
Instagram: At first, you’ll have a lot more engagement here if you pay any attention to how to use hashtags. You should immediately see Likes and comments on your posts. That can be encouraging. And it’s also easy to scroll through your feed and Like other pictures you appreciate. On the other hand, there’s not typically a lot of back and forth. Instagram is not the forum for deep conversations.
Winner: Push
Content Marketing
Twitter: This is one of the social kings of content marketing. It’s all about sharing, and driving people to your content, whether that’s a blog post, a book sales page, or your Tumblr of unbearably cute cat pics. If you want to entice people to click to a particular place online, Twitter does a great job of that.
Instagram: They’re going to keep you confined to Instagram, so there are no links. Just pictures. So you can post a picture of your book, or instance, but you can’t post a comment about your book alongside a link to its Amazon sale page. So there are limitations.
Winner: Twitter
Finding Readers/Customers
Twitter: One big advantage for Twitter is in retweets. There’s no comparable function on Instagram, and that’s a significant help for finding people to consume what you’re selling. The power of someone retweeting your share about your new book is that amplification, lending further credence to what you wrote. That helps you find new people from new social groups you might never have found otherwise.
Instagram: Hashtags are really easy to use, and you can use as many of them as you like without looking like an idiot, unlike on Twitter. That’s probably your biggest avenue toward reaching new people, and you hope those people will want to share your stuff on their own. You can also Re-Gram other people’s posts via Hootsuite, which can be a way to get shared as well.
Winner: Twitter, by a hair
Overall, I’m going to go with Twitter as a better social network for marketing a book, but your results may vary, as they say. That’s especially true if you’d just be starting on Twitter. If you’d be beginning completely from scratch, the lower barriers to entry may make Instagram a more attractive choice. But if you have some Twitter knowledge and presence, I think it has a slight edge here.
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