Brands Experience Higher Engagement On Instagram Than Twitter, Report Finds

A recent report published by Socialbakers has discovered that brands with an online presence on Instragram tend to receive 50 times more engagement than those present on Twitter, Marketing Week reports. Engagement was measured in terms of the number of retweets, replies and favourites received by a brand on both sites. There is, however, no direct correlation between the engagement buttons on either site.

The average post engagement rate for brands on Instagram was 3.31%, whereas on Twitter it was a dismal 0.07%. There were also significantly more profile interactions on Instagram compared to Twitter, with 19 million and 502,102 interactions for brands respectively.

The 25 “most engaging” brands on both sites were analysed, with Playstation, Nike and Paddypower featuring highly on Twitter and Adidas ranking high on Instagram.

With Instagram increasing its user-base significantly in the past 12 months, overtaking Twitter with 300 million active users compared to 284 million, brands would do well to create a presence on the site. Jan Rezab, the CEO of Socialbakers, said that: “We’ve found countless instances that prove engagement is tied with more reach […] Marketers should put ad spend toward the content that performs well.”

Despite this supposedly simple comparison, important factors regarding the psychology of the sites may be left out; the ‘like’ button on Instagram and the speech bubbles used for comments may be seen as less ambiguous than Twitter’s equivalent, Rezab claims.

Both sites have different interfaces and they also have different objectives; Instagram’s unique selling point revolves around imagery, whereas Twitter is news-focussed. For this reason, businesses are generally advised to concentrate on real business objectives like revenue and sales, as opposed to measuring social engagement.