Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

It’s raining in San Francisco. Hard. Trees have already fallen, and the skeletons of cast-off umbrellas are tumbling down the street. This is the kind of storm that drives a girl to social media to watch the drama unfold. And while Twitter historically has been the best place to unearth real-time updates and descriptions, it’s not nearly as compelling as the stream of images flooding Instagram today.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead. Try it. Pull up your app and hit the magnifying glass on the bottom left. That’s the explore tab. Now search for rain in San Francisco, or better yet, try searching for the hashtag #Hellastorm. There’s a photo of cars driving down a road so flooded their wheels are invisible beneath the water. There’s a photo of a sign on the door of Santa Rosa Junior College, announcing it’s closing at noon. And there’s the one I just posted of my friend Carla throwing sandbags into the back of her station wagon to stop the water currently gushing into her garage.

Embedded in the captions, many of which are dense with information, is the kind of local news I’ve seen before—in tweets. The puddle at 9th and Irving went up to mid-calf. This section of Highway 1 in Pacifica near Manor Drive is flooded. Instagram has become a visual version of the real-time news stream that Twitter invented. And with 300 million monthly active users, it’s beating out the little blue bird to become the dominant mass messaging platform.

Fast forward to today and Twitter is still very popular, but the network is not as dominant as it used to be. One of the reasons Twitter has seen a slight decline is due to the most engaging social media app currently available, Instagram.

The Twitter vs. Instagram debate has been very interesting to say the least. We’ve seen some marketers and big brands start to shift away from heavily focusing on Twitter and put more effort toward Instagram.

Right now, Instagram is where consumers live. But does that mean you should jump ship and forget about Twitter too?

Not necessarily. We’ll break down some of the similarities and differences between the two social networks and help you get a clearer picture of which one is best for your brand....