Overview
With over 50% of the world's population using social media, it's evident that different platforms cater to diverse groups with varying preferences. Facebook and Instagram are two prominent platforms with distinct features and billions of users.
While Facebook encourages users to share life events, thoughts, and other posts using text, photos, and videos, Instagram tends to focus more on creative content through photos and videos. Interestingly different personas of each platform’s users have started to proliferate in pop culture, often displayed on these social networks themselves.
As part of our series of experiments on social media preferences, we sought to investigate whether using a particular social media platform, in this case Facebook vs. Instagram, affects the likability of the user.
The Experiment
We conducted a survey experiment with 400 research participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), testing how using Facebook vs. Instagram affects a person’s likability. Participants were given a vignette scenario in which they were introduced to a hypothetical new acquaintance and informed of their favorite social media platform, either Facebook or Instagram, randomly assigned.
Specifically, participants were instructed to "Imagine that you and a new acquaintance are talking about social media, and they mention that their favorite social media platform is [Facebook / Instagram]."
Participants were then asked, “How much do you like this person? (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely)” using a 1-7 survey scale. Participants also answered a few short demographic survey questions, including their gender and age, which allowed us to test whether the results were influenced by these demographics.
Results
Our analysis revealed that our Instagram user was liked more (avg. = 4.59) than our Facebook user (avg. = 4.23), (p = 0.027). However, this difference was relatively small, amounting to about 8.5%, or slightly less than a quarter of a standard deviation. Furthermore, there were no significant interactions with age nor gender, suggesting that these factors did not influence the likability gap.
Conclusion
In this study, Instagram users seemed to garner a bit more likability than Facebook users, at least when the topic comes up in conversation and you mention that one is your favorite. Admittedly, the victory was not overwhelming. The results may simply reflect users' changing preferences for platforms that prioritize image and video content, or perhaps the negative image that Facebook, now rebranded as Meta, has garnered in the press. But all else withstanding, if the topic of social media comes up in conversation, talking about your use of Instagram may just score you a bit of a “like” relative to Facebook.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in likability between our Facebook and Instagram user, we used an independent two-sample t-test. The coefficient and corresponding "p-value" were used to determine significance, with p-values below 0.05 indicating statistical significance. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analyses were used to test for potential interactions between the main results and participant demographics, including age and gender. Data and survey materials for this study are available upon request.