Pinterest vs. Instagram – which is the best platform for marketing?

At FeedMagnet, we have the pleasure of working with some of the best social marketers in the world - across B2B and B2C brands - implementing social marketing campaigns. And while the brands and their social marketing programs vary widely, the social platforms themselves are perhaps even more distinctly different.

Take the two hottest visual social platforms right now: Instagram and Pinterest. Both are about personal expression and sharing with friends, yet they are completely different in the way they accomplish those goals. Instagram is about sharing a snapshot of what's happening in your world right now and Pinterest is about organizing and sharing the things you love.

For brand marketers, there is actually opportunity in both social platforms. Which is the "best" depends on how the brand's audience aligns with the demographics of the two platforms and how the brand's objectives map to the differences plotted below.

User generated vs. user curated

Instagram is all about personal expression and original creativity. As a photo sharing app, the content is almost entirely user-generated and original. It's about sharing your life and the world around you with others. Pinterest, on the other hand, has very little original photography or artwork and is more about sharing things you've found out in the world and on the web with others. So for a beauty brand doing social media marketing, Pinterest is great for enabling customers to share your product images and links to product pages with their friends, while Instagram is great for capturing real user-generated snapshots of people wearing or using the product. Both can enable fans to share their love of the brand, but Instagram is more intimate and personal, while Pinterest is more recommendation-oriented – more like a consumer review or endorsement.

Real time vs. evergreen

Instagram emphasizes real-time, in-the-moment engagement and sharing. For brands wanting to show real-time social engagement around an event or promotion, Instagram is by far the best way to get visual social content. Pinterest content, on the other hand, has much more staying power. Because of the timeline based display and constant flow of new content pushing old stuff downstream, photos shared on Instagram are hot today, then ancient history tomorrow. Pinterest breaks free of the chronological timeline idiom common to other social platforms by enabling users to arrange pinboards, grouping similar things together or putting their favorite things toward the top. This means that a pin added to a board in Pinterest can continue to have relevance and get views well in to the future.

Brand mentions vs. direct click-through

Pinterest has a special value for marketers in that it provides links through to the original content. So while Instagram photos showing a product or brand in action are often tagged with the brand name, providing visibility to the brand, Pinterest pins can actually generate direct traffic to product pages. Even better, those links in can be tracked via web analytics to actually measure the impact of Pinterest social marketing programs on web visitors, and even revenue in the case of e-commerce sites.

One final distinction to consider between these two platforms is maturity. At FeedMagnet, we've been powering Instagram photo contests, live Instagram real-time displays at events, and social hubs featuring Instagram content for a while now. Pinterest on the other hand is relatively new and does not have as robust an ecosystem of social software for marketers. While we've been working with Instagram for over a year, we just launched Pinterest as a content source last week.

We're really looking forward to seeing how these differences play out in future social marketing programs powered by our platform.