Marketers Weigh In: Instagram or Snapchat Stories?

Be honest: Do you spend a lot of time during your work day chatting with colleagues on messaging apps, like Slack?

It's okay -- so do we. And while some of our messages are GIFs and emojis (okay, the majority of our messages), we also get into lots of lively Slack discussions (okay, debates) about news stories and product announcements in the marketing technology space.

So when my colleague, senior growth marketing manager Niti Shah, sent around a link to Apptopia's analysis of Snapchat's slowing user growth, it sparked a discussion of who uses which app for sharing disappearing messages, and which is better -- Snapchat Stories, or Instagram Stories.

The conversation evolved from there, so we wanted to open it up to our inbound.org community members, too.

So we asked marketers the following:

When do you prefer to use Snapchat, and when do you prefer Instagram for Stories?
When do you use Snapchat vs. Instagram for different marketing purposes?
And now, we're sharing some of marketers' biggest reasons for why they prefer each platform -- read on for some of the highlights of the debate below.

Why Use Instagram Stories?

The most resounding point that came up again and again -- on both inbound.org and on Slack -- was Instagram's size advantage: While Snapchat hit 166 million users earlier this year, Instagram Stories alone has already racked up an impressive 250 million users.

And that's probably because any one of Instagram's 700 million total users can click on Stories to start seeing ephemeral content from accounts they follow. So it's no surprise that marketers at HubSpot and on inbound.org saw the advantages of leveraging their reach with existing audiences on Instagram to share ephemeral content.

Via: Hubspot