Social media marketing is more important than ever, with visual social networking taking the lead on the standard text-based channels. Nearly all social networking platforms utilise imagery and videos to enhance their content, however the most truly effective method to take advantage of visual marketing is through social networking channels that generate imagery and videos specifically.

In terms of image based social networking, there seem to be two distinct platforms, which seem similar in offering identical services. Both of these choices are Instagram and Pinterest.

We will discuss the key points of interest for both platforms, and observe how Instagram and Pinterest compare. Therefore, hopefully exercising which visual platform could be most beneficial to enhance your brand.

Users

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networking networks, currently weighing in with approximately 70 million regular users. Also, Pinterest is exclusive in offering an audience that's predominantly female at a lot of approximately 68%, with the greatest gender difference of some other social networking channel. Pinterest users also are generally slightly older in general.

Compared, free followers for instagram has a remarkable 200 million active and regular users, with approximately 45 million photos shared and 1 billion photos "liked" every day. Males and females are more evenly represented on the platform. The application can be most favored by younger users, and has the exact same core demographic of 18-34 year olds as Pinterest.

Engagement

As far as user engagement, Instagram far outweighs the engagement rate of Pinterest, possibly due to the undeniable fact that Instagram has over double the total amount of active users. Additionally, Instagram's user engagement has over 50 times the engagement rate of Facebook, in addition to 20 times the engagement of Twitter, in accordance with recent research.

However, in terms of accessibility goes for both Instagram and Pinterest, Instagram does appear to be harder to gain access to, because the platform is just currently available via a phone application. Although Instagram afford them the ability to see the website online on a computer, you are limited in what you can do on the computer.

Content

The main difference is in the information you are able to generate onto your individual and business Pinterest and Instagram accounts. Instagram promotes original content, and encourages users to produce photos that they may edit with filters and other photo altering tools on the application. Whereas Pinterest allows users to curate other users' content onto their particular profiles as they wish, provided that they keep carefully the sources.

Also, in the event that you wished to upload content onto Pinterest, they supply you with the choice to Pin from outside websites, via the URL, or upload from content on your own computer. Some outside websites also make their images in a position to be "Pinned" straight from their pages, and put in a "hover-on" button, which appears once you pass your mouse within the image.

Linkbuilding

Linkbuilding is far more easily utilised on Pinterest. Once you click on their images, it requires one to the internet site source. And also this causes it to be a lot easier to upload written blog articles from your internet site, as you are able to "Pin" the key image from your own website, and add the description, so your image links back once again to the article.