Instagram Ads or Facebook Ads: Which Works Better for Hull Businesses?

Should we be advertising on Instagram or Facebook? It’s one of the first questions business owners in Hull ask us, and it often comes from someone who has boosted a few posts and still can’t tell what, if anything, they did.

The short answer is that you don’t have to choose before you start. Both apps belong to Meta, and one campaign with one budget can put your ads on either. What matters more is where your customers spend their time, and what your work looks like on a phone screen.

This post covers how that works, which kinds of Hull business lean which way, and how to check where your enquiries came from.

Facebook and Instagram ads can share one campaign

Facebook ads and Instagram ads are built in the same place, Meta Ads Manager. That’s why you’ll hear agencies call the whole thing Meta advertising, and why our work as a Meta ads agency in Hull covers both apps at once.

When you set up a campaign, you choose where the ads are allowed to appear. Meta calls these placements. On Instagram, that means the Feed, Stories, Reels and Explore. On Facebook, it’s the Feed, Marketplace, Stories, Reels and a handful of others.

You can leave them all switched on or pick a shortlist yourself. Either way, Meta’s own guidance says its system spreads the budget across the placements you’ve allowed and leans towards the ones getting results for less.

In our experience, that’s worth letting it do. Nobody knows in advance whether your next customer will find you in a Reel or halfway down the Facebook feed.

Which Hull businesses tend to suit Instagram

Instagram is a visual app first, so it tends to suit businesses where the result is something you can see. If you run an aesthetics clinic, a dental practice doing smile makeovers, or a kitchen and bathroom company, the finished work does most of the selling. Stories and Reels give it the whole screen.

Food works the same way. A plate going out at a restaurant on Princes Avenue, or a busy Friday night at a bar in the Fruit Market, makes a natural Reel.

One note for clinics: aesthetics and dental advertising have their own rules on what you can show and claim, so check those before you film anything.

Instagram isn’t only for glossy businesses, either. Across 90 days of organic posting for Quick & Clarke, an East Yorkshire estate agent, Reels drove 81% of all their Instagram views.

That’s one account, and it was organic posting rather than ads, so treat it as a pointer. But estate agency isn’t the first business you’d think of for Instagram, and short vertical video was still what people watched.

Where Facebook tends to pull its weight

Businesses that sell to homeowners tend to lean the other way. If you’re a roofer in Hedon or a solar installer covering east Hull, in our experience a lot of the people you want to reach are on Facebook most days.

If you’ve ever seen a neighbour ask a village Facebook group for a decent plasterer, you’ll know the habit, and why an advert from a local firm fits right in.

The layout differs too. On Facebook, your words sit above the picture, so they tend to get read first. On Instagram, the caption sits underneath and gets cut short, so the picture has to do more of the work.

Our free Facebook ad preview tool shows your ad in both feeds before you spend anything, with a warning where the text gets cut off.

None of this is a hard rule. Plenty of homeowners are on Instagram too, and a kitchen fitter is selling a visual result to homeowners at the same time. That’s one more reason to run both and let the results decide.

Make video for Reels and Stories

Reels and Stories run on both apps, and both are vertical and full screen, at 9:16. A widescreen clip made for your website tends to end up cropped or shrunk.

In our experience, the videos that work there have a few things in common:

• They make sense on mute. Meta’s own guidance suggests video should still work with the sound off, so put captions on screen.
• The first couple of seconds show the result or the problem, not your logo.
• They’re filmed vertically from the start, so nothing important gets cropped off.
• They show real work: the actual kitchen in Kirk Ella, the actual treatment room, the actual person who’ll turn up.

Stock footage tends to look like an advert, and people scroll past adverts. Real footage of a real job, on a street people recognise, looks like something worth stopping for. That’s why our content days are filmed on site, at the client’s own business.

If you’re working from photos instead, make two versions of your best one: a 4:5 for the feed and a 9:16 for Stories. Our free social media image resizer crops a photo to the right size for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and ads, so the crop is your choice rather than the app’s.

Check where your enquiries came from

Before you decide one app works better, look at where your enquiries actually came from. Ads Manager will show you:

• Open the campaign and click Breakdown, above the results table.
• Under By delivery, choose Placement, or Platform if you just want Facebook against Instagram.
• Compare results and cost per result for each line, rather than reach or clicks.

Meta moves its menus around now and then, so the wording may differ. If you use Meta’s instant forms, download the leads too. In our experience the file shows whether each lead came through Facebook or Instagram, so you can check it against who actually booked.

Two words of caution. Wait until you have a decent number of enquiries, because a handful can swing either way.

And don’t switch a placement off just because its average cost looks higher. Meta’s help pages call this the breakdown effect: the system chases the cheapest next result across all the placements you’ve allowed, so one that looks dearer on average can still be earning its keep.

Start with both, then follow the enquiries

For most Hull service businesses, our advice is to start with both. Run one campaign across Facebook and Instagram, give it vertical video for Reels and Stories plus a version for the feed, and let Meta spread the budget.

Then judge it on cost per enquiry and booked jobs, not likes or followers. Likes are nice to see, but they don’t fill the diary. A Reel with loads of likes and no enquiries hasn’t done its job. A plain Facebook feed ad that keeps bringing in booked surveys has.

When we set up a Meta campaign for Yates Electrical Solutions, an East Yorkshire electrical contractor, it ran across Facebook and Instagram together. The numbers that mattered were the enquiries: 40 new leads in the first 28 days, at an average of £8.67 per lead.

After a few weeks, put the placement breakdown next to your own list of booked jobs. If one app keeps sending enquiries that never turn into work, that’s the time to change the video, the offer or the placements. Not before.

If you’d rather hand over the filming, the setup and the reporting, you can see how we run Instagram advertising in Hull and get in touch from there. We’re based at Bridgehead Business Park in Hessle, so we’re just as happy to talk it through in person.