Instagram vs TikTok: An overview

Instagram and TikTok are among the largest and social media platforms in the world today. Instagram advertising is well established on the Facebook-owned platform, which has over 1 billion active users. TikTok, on the other hand, has seen explosive growth despite its more recent formation and currently boasts just under 700 million active monthly users.

Both are enormously powerful tools for viral marketing, business advertising and customer outreach if you learn to leverage them effectively for your brand.

Deciding which to use isn’t so much a question of which is superior to the other; rather, it’s about knowing which fits better with your brand’s target market and demographic.

Whether it’s Instagram or TikTok that works best for your business, this guide can get you started with effective advertising on both.

Pros and cons of Instagram advertising

A crucial part of social media strategy is knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms you choose. This definitely applies to a huge platform like Instagram, which has both strengths and general weaknesses. You’ll notice others as you learn how to advertise on Instagram.

Pros

• Instagram ads are great for brand visibility. Instagram is an extremely visual social media platform that places a particular focus on visually pleasing photo and video posts. Each post also gives you plenty of space for text links, hashtags and product descriptions. This makes Instagram especially useful for advertising highly visual products over services.
• You can pay to play immediately. Developing an organic brand presence on social media can be time-consuming and slow, but with dynamically targeted advertising on Instagram, you can pay to be visible in the feeds of possible customers as soon as you’ve organized your campaign.
• Instagram ads are dynamic and versatile. Because Facebook is the owner of Instagram, you can use the former platform to manage your advertising on the latter. This also means your Instagram ads can be managed through tools from one of the most sophisticated ad management systems in existence.
• Instagram offers diverse presentation options. Aside from its versatility for targeting potential customers, Instagram lets you create ads that appear as individual photos, videos of up to one minute and even multimedia collection ads. These options are great for both products and services.
• Users love Instagram for finding products. 70% of online shoppers turn to Instagram for new products in their interest areas. This figure indicates that the social media platform performs as an active place for deliberate shopping. If your brand can harness the visual features of the platform, sales can become much more likely.

Cons

• Instagram ads are not as advanced as native Facebook ads. While you can use the Facebook ad platform to dynamically manage your Instagram ads in many ways, some features of Facebook ad management aren’t available on Instagram. This makes for simplified advertising, but it also limits your ability to create certain campaigns.
• Instagram isn’t always friendly to external links. The interface for this social media platform places strong emphasis on having users tap images or videos, or the icons right below them, to show their appreciation with a “like.” Any detailed text you place under your ad won’t be fully visible unless a user opens the ad for a full text view.
• Your audience will be limited. While Instagram has many, many users from all walks of life, over 71% of them are between the ages of 18 and 29. If you’re aiming for younger audiences, this is great, but for some types of advertising it can be a wasted effort.

How to advertise on Instagram

You can advertise on Instagram through a variety of different publicity types. Some of the most common options include:

• Photo ads
• Stories ads
• Video ads
• Collection ads
• Multimedia Carousel ads
• Explore ads
• Reel Ads

With all of these as options, you can then set up Instagram advertising campaigns either right through the app itself or via Facebook Ads Manager. The simpler of the two options is Instagram itself, while the Facebook manager route gives you more ad modification and targeting options.

Advertise directly through Instagram

If your page on Instagram is already set up and you’re populating it with photos, videos or any of the above posts, you can simply boost any one of them individually and directly as an ad by navigating to it and clicking “Promote” right under the post in question.

• To do this, your Instagram account must be classified as a Business account or Creator account. You’ll also have to set up or use a Facebook Business Page that connects with your Instagram account.
• Once you’ve done this, simply click Create Promotion and go through a few simple steps to target your ad and the budget you want for it. Once you’ve done this, your post will be boosted as an advertisement. It’s pretty simple.

Instagram advertising through Facebook Ads Manager

The more elaborate way to choose, start and manage Instagram ads is through Facebook Ad Manager. Because Facebook owns Instagram, the integration between the two is fairly comprehensive. To do this, you’ll need to have an active Facebook creator or business page to start from. This page can be created from your personal Facebook profile on the FB site.

1. Connect your Facebook page and Instagram account to Facebook Business Manager

Once you have a Facebook business page that’s tied to a personal profile on the platform, visit business.Facebook.com and navigate to Business Settings in the dashboard. Here you’ll be given the option of Instagram Accounts, where you can click Add to type in the log-in details of your Instagram account. This integrate your Facebook page and Instagram account for using Ads Manager with both of them.

2. Open Ads Manager in Facebook

Your Facebook Business dashboard will have menu options on the right that include Ads. By clicking on this, you’ll be taken directly to a section for ad creation. Another menu option called More Tools also slides open to a secondary menu that has Ads Manager as one of its options. Both lead to similar options for creating ads.

3. Choose your ad creation workflow

Facebook’s Ads Manager offers a Guided Creation option and a Quick Creation option for posting both Instagram and FB ads. Guided Creation does just that—it guides you through a series of suggestions for how to set up and fine-tune your first ad. It’s a useful option for beginning marketers.

Quick Creation gives you more control of your ads but is also more complicated to use. For most Instagram advertisers, the sequence of tools and options in Guided Creation will be easier to work with and ultimately gives you the same options for Instagram advertisements.

4. Create your ad campaign

Under Guided Creation, you’ll be able to set your marketing objective, set an advertising schedule, identify your target audience, select your ad placement locations, create a specific budget for your ad and then create your ad or ads.

Once you’ve chosen an ad type, you can then select the pictures or videos you want to use, create your ad text and even choose payment and link options before clicking confirm. The last steps to creating your ad let you create a call-to-action button that can take your audience to a destination URL of your choice.

5. Keep an eye on Insights

Your Facebook Business dashboard and Ads Manager let you access a section called Insights, through which you can track not only the performance of your ad campaign but also that of all your Instagram posts, whether they’re paid advertisements or organic. This is useful for tweaking performance.

How much does it cost to advertise on Instagram?

The cost of Instagram advertising can vary because it depends on the ad placement parameters you’re bidding for in competition with other advertisers. This cost can most commonly be viewed as CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or CPC (cost per click). On average, Instagram’s price for CPM is about $8, while CPC can range between $0.90 and $1.50.

If you target your audience well and create compelling ads, these costs will be offset by the return they provide. In either case, you only need to worry about ads performing badly, not about spending too much. This is because regardless of how much your CPM or CPC is individually, you can always set a maximum budget for an ad campaign that Facebook/Instagram won’t exceed.

Want to spend just $5 for a week of limited ads? You can do that, or you can set your budget to thousands of dollars. It’s better to focus on careful targeting rather than high spending.

Pros and cons of TikTok advertising

TikTok isn’t quite as large as Instagram, but it’s getting close to its older rival in terms of active monthly users and demographic profiles. This social media platform has become famous for its immensely viral nature and how it lets users post videos that garner lots of views based on their content, even if the user has only a modest following.

Because of this, videos posted by users with only a few followers have been known to absolutely explode with hundreds of thousands of views.

TikTok also has its flaws, and here are some of these along with its pros.

Pros

• Exploding popularity. TikTok has become the single most downloaded app in the world, with over 2 billion downloads by April 2021. Both Facebook and Instagram trail behind it in second and third place by this metric. The world of social media can be fickle when it comes to popularity, but with this kind of growth dynamic, TikTok is very likely to stay dominant for a long time to come.
• Exposure to hundreds of millions of users. New downloads aside, TikTok has just under 700 million active monthly users. This is an enormous amount, and more importantly, the frequency with which these users enter the platform is exceptionally high, with the average person spending over 850 minutes per month on the platform and 90% of all users accessing TikTok at least once per day.
• Advertisements on TikTok play automatically. Because this social media platform is designed to maximize content consumption through small 15-second videos, advertisements that are placed on it play automatically for their targeted audience. Considering TikTok’s levels of user engagement, your opportunities for persistent exposure to users are major.
• Massive international reach. TikTok is now available in 155 countries and 75 languages. Furthermore, in most of the major world markets, it’s seen nothing but extensive user growth since it launched. Few other social media apps can beat the sheer rapid-fire international popularity of TikTok for advertising to diverse audiences.

Cons

• TikTok’s mostly appeals to younger audiences. Much like Instagram, TikTok has its biggest appeal with younger audiences. Internationally, 60% of users are 35 or younger, and in the U.S., about 62% of them are aged 10 to 29. If your target audience is older and the products or services you sell are aimed at mature buyers, TikTok might not be ideal.
• TikTok advertising can be surprisingly expensive. Until recently, TikTok only allowed advertising on the platform through expensive private deals between the company and major brands, but this has changed. Currently, campaigns can be set up for no less than $50 each. While this isn’t huge, if you want to test out several different campaigns for their effectiveness with different offers, Instagram’s tiny minimum campaign budget limits of just a few dollars look much more affordable.
• Censorship. TikTok is owned by a Chinese company and based in China. While this isn’t normally a problem for the majority of business advertising, there are contexts in which a certain post or ad campaign touches on a politically sensitive subject. This can cause your campaign and even your account to be blocked.
• Low engagement. Because TikTok is built around a constant stream of extremely short videos, it’s designed to keep users consuming. This makes leading them away from the platform difficult. The problem can be even worse if your ads aren’t carefully aimed at this social site’s very young demographic and its interests.

How to advertise on TikTok

If your target demographic fits with the majority of TikTok’s users, then this explosively growing internationally popular social media platform might be ideal for you. Here’s the basic process of how to advertise on TikTok.

1. Create a TikTok Ads account

Your first TikTok campaign starts with a visit to the TikTok Ads home page, where you’ll see a button called Create an Ad. TikTok is still refining the delivery of its advertising service, so the user experience isn’t quite as smooth as it tends to be with Facebook or Instagram. A form will request personal details necessary for your account. Once you’ve completed this, you may have to wait up to 48 hours for activation.

2. Create an advertising campaign

Once you’ve entered your account dashboard, you can now click on the Campaign tab that’s visible at the top of the page to create your first ad run. The process first asks you to set the main objective of your ads: Traffic, Conversions or App Install. This is also where you can set your ad campaign’s budget, which will have to be $50 at minimum for a daily, weekly or monthly time-frame.

3. Set your TikTok Ad placement and other details for targeting

In this section of your campaign creation dashboard, you can do three main things. The first is to set which TikTok-owned ad platforms you’d like your ads to appear on. There are several, such as BuzzVideo and New Republic. You can also let TikTock automatically set placement for you based on your other ad campaign settings.

Secondly, you can set your ad parameters, which include relevant URLs, images, categories and up to 20 keywords that describe the website or app you’re promoting. These keywords also help guide your ads to relevant TikTok users

Finally, you’ll reach a targeting section that lets you define the diverse parameters of your target audience. This part of TikTok’s ad dashboard isn’t as extensive as Facebook’s, but it does let you choose target audiences based on age, location, gender, language and interests such as fashion or cooking.

4. Set your budget and campaign duration

It’s important to set limits on the amount of money and the length of time you want for your ad campaign. With these carefully defined, you can test ad sets for effectiveness without spending too much. TikTok lets you set a minimum cost of $50 for your total or daily budget and a minimum price of $20 per ad group. You can also select the specific times of day or days of the week when you want your ads to run.

Another thing you can adjust while setting your ad budget is the pace at which it’s spent. This will ensure TikTok spends the money either evenly across the whole time span of your campaign or as quickly as possible with maximum saturation.

5. Design your ads themselves with TikTok’s tools

Tiktok offers a whole collection of tools for editing and formatting your videos. You can make your ads horizontal, vertical or square or use specific templates from TikTok’s extensive Video Creation Kit tool set. This offers numerous video and image templates you can use for your own video as well as hundreds of free background music options.

6. Optimize and tweak your ads

With TikTok, tweak your ads for a call to action that’s up-front, simple and very carefully aimed at creating interest right away. This is almost always crucial for advertising in general, but for TikTok and its rapidly flowing 15-second video streams, it becomes absolutely vital. In-advertisement text can’t be longer than 80 characters, so you’ll want to very carefully cultivate a powerful CTA inside your video or image.

How much does it cost to advertise on TikTok?

As mentioned above, TikTok advertising tends to be on the pricier side. The minimum cost for a single ad campaign is now $50. This can be quite a burden if you want to experiment with multiple campaign runs, but it’s an improvement from the platform’s previous policy of setting minimum budgets at $500 per campaign.

CPM on TikTok still tends to be expensive, though. Compared to Facebook/Instagram’s average CPM of $8, TikTok’s minimal CPM usually starts at $10. These costs can add up if your target audience or advertising strategy don’t align with how TikTok delivers content to its viewers.