both. Engagement is important, the quality of your posts is important, you have a window of opportunity, and creating conversations is the goal. On both platforms the Face- book’s goal is to keep you around as long as possible. So, anything you share that keeps your audience’s attention is good! 2. You can cross-publish If you are the admin of a page on Facebook, you can go into your settings on Instagram and link the two accounts. This allows you to choose to also share your posts on Facebook when you are posting to Instagram. I do this fairly often, but there are some things to keep in mind on this topic: • Often, you’ll want to change the text: there are certain nuances of Instagram that don’t apply to Facebook, and you’ll want to change, examples could be hashtags, “link in bio” etc. • Not every post is great for both platforms. You don’t want your Facebook and Instagram to be identical. Then why would we follow you in both places? • It doesn’t work the other way around, i.e. you can’t post to Facebook then also share to Instagram. • Stats show that Facebook prefers when you post natively on the platform, instead of using a 3rd party. Therefore, your reach may be lower by using this method. 3. Ads Manager Another similarity which I assume is the results in both being owners by Facebook is the ads. When you create ads for Instagram (which you need a business account for) you do so inside the Facebook ads manager. You can do a few simple things within the Ins- tagram app, but you’ll generally want to go into the ads manager for anything more complex than a boost. 1. Profiles are treated equally This is probably my favourite thing about Instagram. Both platforms allow you to have a “business account.” But on Instagram, all profiles are treated equally. On Facebook, you can’t go and comment on profiles easily, but on Insta- gram, you can, which makes engagement super easy! You can comment on anyone’s post as long as they don’t have a private account. 2. Invites vs follows On Facebook, this is how you connect with people. You are either ‘friends’ where you have both made an indication that you want to connect, or you like a page. And you have the option to Invite your friends to like your page. DIFFERENCES
getting followers, but that’s what you do need to know. You can follow anyone, but they don’t necessarily have to follow you. And, there is no way to “invite” ppl to follow you. 3. Instagram is a native and mobile platform On Facebook, you can do pretty much anything. Instagram is a bit more limited and really contains you to the app. You can’t share links in captions, you can’t “share” or retweet.” You can post a photo or a video and that’s where it stops. Everything is native, meaning you need to upload directly into the app. There are apps that make life easier. Instagram now let’s business profiles schedule posts (with the help of 3rd party apps). Before it they just reminded you and if you were lucky, it would copy the text to your clipboard. And on that note, it’s mobile only. You can access your Ins- tagram profile from a desktop, but you can’t post or do much. Again, there are 3rd party apps that let you post, but for the most part it’s only mobile.
On Instagram, you basically follow others and hope they follow you back. Yes, there is an entire strategy behind
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • AUGUST 2018
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