Visual social media platforms — think Instagram and Pinterest — are a huge hit with brands, consumers and potential customers. But with limited time or resources, how do you decide between the two when it comes to your marketing strategy?

Instagram in a nutshell
Instagram makes it easy to create quality photos that make your business look more professional and creative. Users can take pictures and videos from a mobile device, apply filters, add captions and share the images on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more.

Instagram’s primary audience is adult women, teens and the under-30 crowd. It’s generally best for sharing unique content, creating brand awareness and show-casing what goes on behind the scenes at your brand.

Take an interest in Pinterest
The more search engine-like Pinterest can be used to find specific content or products. Users tend to focus on discovering like-minded users’ content, then grouping and pinning it on visually appealing boards.

Every pin is a link to the source of the image on an external site, which can help you increase site traffic and engagement with your content. Pinterest tends to attract women, foodies and crafters as its main audience, and works well for sharing visual content and how-to illustrations to boost your SEO, web traffic and sales.

Using social visuals to your advantage, Marketers can leverage visual sharing sites like Pinterest and Instagram in many ways:

Connect with customers — lots of customers. As of 2015, Pinterest had 176 million+ registered users, while Instagram amassed over 400 million. Instagram also has one of the most active and engaged user bases. Share a photo of a product, get input and feedback and build relationships through the conversations you spark. /p>

Promote events. Both sites are ideal for promoting trade shows, conventions and other live events. For example, post “save the date” images of the city where the event is scheduled, sneak peek videos of event set-up or speakers preparing, and daily snapshots while the event’s in full swing.

Fuel other marketing channels. Your visual content can be easily shared across other social media channels. Enable social sharing to Facebook, for example, so your photos share automatically when you post them to Instagram or Pinterest.

The bottom line
Still deciding which is right for your business? Picture your ideal customer — where he or she would be more likely to spend time browsing — and go from there. Maximize your spend by concentrating on where your customers already are.