It’s a question I am being asked a lot at the moment – is there an alternative to Facebook & Instagram for our business? There are a few reasons that businesses are asking this question.
They are frustrated by the lack of reach. For years, they have been ‘pay to play’ platforms that require ads to achieve goals. Ad costs are rising. Users are expecting entertaining content that is time consuming and costly to create. They are fed up with constant changes that do not improve the platform and make it more complex to use. They are seeing customers move to other platforms through concern about privacy issues and irritation with ads. So much is wrong with the most powerful social media platforms in the world! And it’s affecting business.
The trouble is that Facebook has been the power player for a very long time and it has the lion’s share of personal and local community social media use in the UK.
YouTube – 54.8 million users
Linkedin – 45 million users
Facebook – 38.3 million users
Instagram – 33.4 million users
TikTok – 24.8 million users
X – 22.9 million users
Pinterest – 15.5 million users
Threads – 5.3 million users
BlueSky – 3.5 million users (US & UK)
What are the alternatives to Facebook & Instagram for business?
There are so many social media platforms out there right now! I will cover the major ones.
YouTube is the obvious choice with a huge user base. Running a YouTube channel requires video content. It needs SEO optimisation and it needs monitoring and moderation. It doesn’t feel like a social media network in the same way as Facebook. It is public, although you can add limitations to restrict countries, but only after you have qualified for YouTube’s Content ID System.
Linkedin is seeing a surge of people who have left X and Facebook. Linkedin is a professional network and it is most beneficial to businesses who sell B2B. There are businesses selling B2C and personal services on Linkedin but the content has to be pitched right to fit into the culture of Linkedin.
TikTok is hugely popular. Is your business the ‘popular’ personality type? If so, TikTok will work for you. It requires an energetic and personable personality front and centre of content. Yes, it is possible to run a TikTok account without a face to the brand, but it still requires trendy and engaging video content. It’s easy to run away with the idea that TikTok is working when you see hundreds, thousands and millions of views on your video. My question is, is it producing the results you need to see (brand awareness, clicks, enquiries, sales)? If it is, great! One thing to note about TikTok is the concern around data collection. TikTok, like Facebook before it, collects vast amounts of data about the users.
Concerns around privacy have driven some users to smaller platforms like Mastodon, Diaspora, MeWe and Minds. If you have never heard of them, you are not alone. They are tiny in comparison with Facebook & Instagram.
One platform gaining traction in 2025 is BlueSky. BlueSky is decentralised, similar to Mastodon. It was originally a Twitter project started by Jack Dorsey while he was CEO of Twitter. It has a very familiar feel, as it looks a lot like Twitter. It is now the largest of the decentralised social media projects. Originally designed so that users could take the open source-protocol and create their own social media platforms. This would allow users to cross-post content. In practice, no-one set up their own platform, they used the one created by new CEO Jay Graber.
That brings us neatly onto X. X at its best was an incredible, fast moving, platform that reaped great results for business connections. At its prime in 2022 it had 368.4 million monthly active users worldwide. Now that figure is estimated to be between 240-300 million daily active users. In the UK there’s only 22 million users. Businesses have fled X to avoid the hate, aggression and politics. Most businesses I work with have now chosen to move active posting to alternative platforms. They have kept their accounts, which may explain X’s claim to 650 million users worldwide.
Threads is another alternative to X but it is owned by Meta, so if your concerns are about the way that Meta runs Facebook and Instagram, it makes no sense to build a new following on a platform that is likely to be managed in the same way.
Pinterest is an interesting outlier. It runs more like a search engine than social media. This is great for clicks and web traffic. It needs SEO optimisation and a lot of content generation (images and videos). Unfortunately, it is overrun with AI generated posts that are turning users against the platform. If you have to wade through a lot of inauthentic posts and ads, the user experience is low quality. Very similar to Facebook, in that respect.
So what are the alternatives to Facebook & Instagram for business?
How you choose the alternative to Facebook and Instagram for your business depends on what you use social media for and what your goals for social media are.
If your goal is traffic to your website, YouTube could be a good choice or Linkedin if you are B2B. TikTok is brilliant for brand awareness as is YouTube if you have the right content. In all cases, look at where your audience is e.g. if you are appealing to Gen Z or a younger demographic, TikTok is a great choice. If your content is predominantly text based, BlueSky is of interest, though it will be some time before it gains enough traction to be a major platform. For a niche business it is perfect.
If you are community building locally, Facebook and Facebook groups are still head and shoulders above the crowd. Facebook groups are not without their problems with moderation to remove the scammers and junk posters taking a lot of time.
Alternative community management platforms like Mighty Networks and Circle are available. They take time to grow i.e. the immediate audience is not there and it has to be encouraged. There is also a hurdle with users remembering to log into another platform to take part. They don’t, unless there is a compelling reason that makes them. For now, most of them are still on Facebook/Instagram.
One final note. If you accept that Facebook & Instagram are currently part of the social media mix that you cannot do without, then consider advertising. Meta advertising is a fantastic way to reach vast numbers of people in a specific demographic area. It circumvents the issue of low organic reach. With the right offer and the right management, it can be hugely successful.