Although we aren’t offering Instagram management services anymore, we still see the value in Instagram marketing and want to explain the difference between Pinterest and Instagram from a strategy standpoint.

Over the last few years, business owners have traditionally turned to Instagram for their main digital media marketing platform. It’s one of the most popular applications in the world, so we get it! But we want to highlight reasons why Instagram may fall short when it comes to marketing, and on the flip side, how it may be more useful than Pinterest.

Ideally, we believe these platforms should work hand in hand, but you should be using them for different reasons. Here are ways that Pinterest and Instagram for business differ:

Pinterest Engagement vs. Instagram Engagement

One of the main reasons business owners love Pinterest marketing over Instagram is because it usually requires less work from you. We all know Instagram can be a time vacuum—it’s exhausting trying to keep up with DMs, Instagram comments, and engaging with other accounts.

Pinterest, on the other hand, requires less engagement from you, if any at all. You may occasionally want to reply to comments on your pins, but they’re much rarer than Instagram.

From a time standpoint, Pinterest is much more efficient, but your Instagram relationships are probably stronger. That’s why we recommending using Pinterest for your audience to initially find you, and Instagram to build trust with your audience afterwards. So your ideal customer journey might look like:

1. Lead finds you on Pinterest
2. Lead visits your site and decides to follow you on Instagram (which is why you should put Instagram in the footer of your website)
3. Lead engages with you on Instagram and builds trust
4. Lead purchases from you.

So although it’s tempting to only invest in Pinterest marketing, they can work together extremely well.

Pinterest Audience vs. Instagram Audience

In general, your audience on Pinterest is much more future-focused. Pinners are in full planning mode, whether they’re planning a photoshoot, their wedding, what to eat for dinner or where to travel to next.

Instagram, however, is more past & present-focused. When you’re scrolling through your feed, you’re probably looking at posts either in real time or from the previous week (for ex., a friend’s wedding).

For that reason, Pinterest requires a lot more planning than Instagram does in terms of content. We usually recommend that you start posting holiday-focused or seasonal content at least 6 weeks in advance, if not three months. Some holidays take even more planning—we start pinning winter holiday gift guides as early as July!

Obviously, both have their pros and cons here. But it’s important to keep this in mind when planning out your content for both platforms.

Pinterest Post Lifespan vs. Instagram Post Lifespan

According to Copypress, the average lifespan of an instagram post is 48 hours. Compared to Pinterest, that is short.

After managing client Pinterest profiles for three years, we’ve seen pins take off (as in get three million views) a full year after being published. Some that we published in 2018 are still getting hundreds of thousands of monthly views. In fact, the average lifespan of a Pinterest post is six months.

So from an ROI perspective, spending five minutes on a pin to get 100k views for six months seems much better than spending 30 minutes writing an Instagram post that will only receive a thousand impressions.

But if you have a highly-engaged audience on Instagram, that Instagram post may still be worth it to get the sale.

The main point of this post is to explain that you should use both of these platforms for different reasons. Obviously, we prefer Pinterest for its virality superpowers and because it is low-maintenance, but Instagram can still be incredibly useful for your business or brand, too!

P.S. Did you know we created both Pinterest templates and Instagram templates to grow your business?! Check them out here!