Your social media time is limited. Posting the same thing to both platforms and then ignoring both isn’t a plan. The question every hotel should be able to answer is simple: where are your guests, and what do they want to see there? The answer for a mountain lodge full of retirees is not the answer for an urban boutique full of weekenders. This guide gives you the data and the tests to answer it for your own property.
We run hotel social media through our hotel social media management service, so weigh that. Every fact below about Facebook and Instagram was checked against Pew Research Center’s fact sheet and Meta’s own help centers in October 2026.
Short answer: in the U.S., more adults use Facebook (71%) than Instagram (50%), but Instagram leads among adults under 30 and Facebook leads among everyone 30 and over. So the platform follows your guest’s age more than your hotel’s style. On the ads side it’s rarely a real choice: one Meta campaign can run on both, and Meta advises judging the campaign’s overall cost per result, not each platform alone. Use Instagram to be discovered, Facebook for events and community, and your own booking data to decide where the effort goes.
The Demographic Reality
As of October 2026, from Pew Research Center’s survey of 5,022 U.S. adults (Feb.–June 2025):
| Age group | Use Facebook | Use Instagram |
|---|---|---|
| All adults | 71% | 50% |
| 18–29 | 68% | 80% |
| 30–49 | 80% | 62% |
| 50–64 | 74% | 40% |
| 65+ | 57% | 19% |
Sources: Pew Research Center, Social Media Fact Sheet.
Before deciding where to spend your time, understand who’s on each platform. A few more cuts from the same survey matter for hotels (source):
- Income: in households earning $100,000 or more, 71% use Facebook and 60% use Instagram.
- Location: 55% of urban adults use Instagram, against 37% of rural adults. Facebook sits at 71% in all three community types.
- Trend: Instagram use rose from 40% of adults in 2021 to 50% in 2025, while Facebook went from 69% to 71%. Pew changed its survey method in 2023, so read the trend as a direction, not a precise number.
Neither platform has a monopoly on any demographic, but the direction is clear: Instagram skews younger and is still growing, Facebook skews older and is stable.
Two limits to keep in mind. These are U.S. adults, so an international guest mix may look different. And Pew measures whether people ever use a platform, not how often they use it or whether they plan trips there. For a hotel, the table tells you where each guest segment is likely to be. Your own data, covered below, tells you where they actually find you.
When Instagram Should Be Your Primary Platform
Your core guest is under 30, or under 50 with a design-led stay. Among 18–29s, Instagram use (80%) is higher than Facebook use (68%), and it still reaches 62% of 30–49s (source). Boutique, urban and experience-led properties tend to sell to these groups.
Your content is visual. Rooms, views, food and small moments carry a hotel’s story without many words. Instagram is built around photos, carousels and Reels, so that content fits the format.
You’re trying to grow discoverability. Instagram says Explore is made up of recommendations from accounts you don’t yet follow, and that the majority of what people see in Reels also comes from accounts they don’t follow (source). That is the main way a property reaches a new audience that doesn’t already know it. Partnering with regional travel creators is another route to those non-followers; see hotel micro-influencer marketing.
Your guests are likely to share their stay on social media. When guests tag your property, you can reshare their posts and stories with permission. Prospective guests then see the stay through someone else’s eyes, which is the loop you want.
When Facebook Should Be Your Primary Platform
Your core guest is 50 or older. Among 50–64s, 74% use Facebook against 40% for Instagram. Among adults 65 and over it’s 57% against 19% (source). Resorts with older regulars, family reunions, and rural or drive-to properties often sit here.
You run events, packages, or promotions with local community components. Facebook Events are made for this. All events hosted by a Facebook Page are public, a Page can set up recurring events, and paid events are only available to Page accounts (source). Wine dinners, holiday weekends, wedding open days and live music nights all fit. People who respond to your Events can later be reached as an ad audience (source).
You want to reach Facebook Groups. Facebook describes Groups as places to connect and share with people who have similar interests, and they can be public or private (source). Destination, wedding-planning and family-travel groups are where travelers ask each other for advice. Join as a helpful local voice and follow each group’s rules on promotion.
Paid advertising is part of your strategy. Facebook is where Meta’s ad tools live, but the audiences aren’t locked to one app. Meta lets you build retargeting audiences from your website visitors, your customer list, people who engaged with your Instagram account, your Facebook Page or your Events (source), and show the ads on both platforms. More on that below.
The Case for Running Both (Strategically)
Most hotels with any marketing bandwidth should keep both accounts, but give each a different job and a different share of your time.
Instagram: primary content platform
- Original photos, carousels and Reels made for the feed
- Stories for what’s happening today: the weather, the menu, a room that just opened up
- Focus: discovery, visual brand-building, resharing guest content
Facebook: supporting platform
- Your Instagram posts, shared over rather than remade
- Events for every package, seasonal promotion and hosted night
- Replies to comments and messages, plus locally relevant posts
- Paid: retargeting campaigns to website visitors and past guests
Sharing over is built in. When your professional Instagram account and your Facebook Page are connected, you can share a post, Reel or story to the Page one at a time, or have all future posts, Reels and stories shared to the Page automatically (source). This captures Instagram’s discovery reach while keeping the event and community tools that live on Facebook.
What Actually Performs on Each Platform
There’s no public benchmark for hotels that settles this, so treat the lists below as starting points to test, not rules. They follow from how each platform ranks content. For Reels, Instagram says its most important predictions are whether you’ll reshare a Reel, watch it all the way through, like it or open its audio page. For Explore, the key actions are likes, saves and shares (source). Content worth saving and sending to a travel partner wins there.
On Instagram, start with:
- Short Reels: a room walkthrough, morning prep, the seasons changing outside
- Local area guides as carousels people save for later
- Specific moments: the fireplace at 7pm, the pool at sunrise
- Guest features, shared with the guest’s permission
- “Why book direct” posts that name the real perks of booking with you
On Facebook, start with:
- Events and promotions with a date or a deadline
- Photo albums of a wedding season, a renovation or a festival weekend
- Longer posts that tell a story about the property or the town
- Local news and community posts that make you part of the neighborhood
- Reminders as an event gets close
On Instagram, skip:
- Generic “we’re open” posts
- Rate announcements with no visual
- Long captions that bury the point
- Posts with no clear next step for the viewer
On Facebook, skip:
- Single photos with no context
- Short captions with nothing to say
- Posts that beg for engagement (“Like this if you’d want to stay here!”)
How to Figure Out Where Your Guests Are
You don’t have to guess. You can measure it.
Option 1: Ask directly. Add “How did you hear about us?” to your booking form or confirmation email. Keep the answers for a full season and you’ll see where discovery happens.
Option 2: Use UTM links. Give your Instagram bio and your Facebook Page separate booking links, tagged with UTM parameters. If your booking engine passes data to your analytics, you’ll see which platform drives actual bookings, not just visits.
Option 3: Check your analytics. Both platforms show who your audience is. Instagram’s insights include the top countries, cities, age ranges and gender of the accounts you reach, for timeframes within the past 90 days. To see demographics you need to reach more than 100 accounts in a preset timeframe (source). Facebook Page Insights show age, gender and location once there’s data for 100 or more people, and keep two years of history (source). Compare both with the age of your actual guests. The platform with the closest match is reaching the right people.
Option 4: Look at engagement patterns. Post the same piece on both platforms for a few weeks. Track comments, shares, saves and profile or link clicks on each. The platform with more meaningful engagement, not just reach, is where your audience is more active.
Example: Reallocating Time at a 30-Room Resort
This is an illustration, not a client story. Picture a 30-room lakeside resort that posts the same content to both accounts and gets little back from either. A sensible way to fix it:
- Ask every direct booker where they first heard about the resort, and record it for a season.
- Compare the answers with the age data in both platforms’ insights.
- If most direct bookers name Instagram, move most of the content effort there.
- Keep Facebook for Events, replies and a retargeting campaign to past guests in shoulder season.
Total social media time stays about the same. The difference is that it now follows the answer to the real question: where are your guests?
The Paid Advertising Dimension
Organic posting is one part of the equation. Paid advertising on Meta’s platforms is a separate channel, and it answers the “Facebook vs Instagram ads for hotels” question in a way most owners don’t expect.
One campaign can run on both. Meta’s Advantage+ placements can show your ads across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Audience Network and Threads. Meta says that in its own experiment, ad sets using Advantage+ placements had an 11.7% lower cost per action on average than ad sets with manual placements (source). You can still pick placements by hand if you have a reason to.
Judge the campaign, not each platform. Meta’s delivery system looks for the cheapest results across all placements, not the lowest cost in each one. In Meta’s worked example, turning off the placement with the higher cost per result made the whole campaign less efficient (source). So a higher cost on Instagram than on Facebook isn’t, by itself, a reason to switch it off.
For hotel paid campaigns, the audiences you can use include:
- Website visitors, tracked with the Meta Pixel (source)
- A customer list of past guests’ emails or phone numbers
- People who interacted with your Instagram account or Facebook Page
- People who responded to your Facebook Events
All of these are listed in Meta’s custom audience types (source). One detail to act on early: a website custom audience starts filling from the day you create it and doesn’t backfill (source). Install the Pixel and create the audience well before the campaign you plan to run.
The advantage of the unified Meta backend: even if you build your organic presence mainly on Instagram, you can still reach Facebook users through paid campaigns without a fully active Facebook feed. The ad tools and audiences are the same wherever your organic focus sits.
The Recommendation for Most Independent Hotels
For an independent hotel with limited social media time:
- Start with the platform your guests’ ages point to. For most boutique and urban hotels that’s Instagram. For properties whose regulars are mostly 50 and over, it may be Facebook.
- Post on a schedule you can keep. A steady rhythm you can sustain beats a burst that stops in month two. Review your insights at the end of each season.
- Maintain the other platform with less effort. Share Instagram posts to your Facebook Page automatically, and use Facebook for Events when you have packages, seasonal promotions or hosted nights.
- Add paid when you have budget. A retargeting campaign to past guests and website visitors can bring people back to book direct. Pair it with a hotel booking system so the clicks land in your own booking engine, not an OTA.
The hotels that get the most from social are not the ones that try to be everywhere. They pick a primary platform, commit to it and measure what works.
The platform that works for your hotel is the one where your actual guests are. That’s measurable, not a guess. Start measuring.
Related Posts
- Instagram strategy for boutique hotels: turning followers into direct bookings
- Facebook and Instagram ads for hotels: boosted posts vs real campaigns
- Meta Ads campaign structure for independent hotels: audiences, Pixel and retargeting
- How Gen Z travelers research and book hotels: the youngest guests and where they look
FAQ
Is Facebook or Instagram better for hotels?
It depends on your guests’ ages. In Pew’s 2025 survey, Instagram leads among U.S. adults aged 18–29 (80% vs 68%), and Facebook leads in every older group, by the widest margin among adults 65 and over (57% vs 19%). Pick the platform that matches your core guest, then confirm it with your own booking data.
Should my hotel post on both Facebook and Instagram?
Usually yes, with different jobs. Make Instagram the main content platform and use Facebook for Events, community and replies. A connected professional Instagram account can share posts, Reels and stories to your Facebook Page automatically, so the second platform costs little extra time.
Are Facebook ads or Instagram ads better for hotels?
You don’t have to choose. Meta’s Advantage+ placements run one campaign across Facebook, Instagram and other Meta apps. Meta advises judging the campaign’s overall cost per result, because switching off a higher-cost placement can make the whole campaign less efficient.
Can I retarget past guests on Instagram and Facebook?
Yes. Meta’s custom audiences include website visitors tracked by the Meta Pixel, customer lists, and people who engaged with your Instagram account, Facebook Page or Events. The same audience can be shown ads on both platforms.
How do I see the age of my Instagram and Facebook audience?
Use Instagram insights and Facebook Page Insights. Instagram shows age ranges once you reach more than 100 accounts in a preset timeframe. Facebook shows age, gender and location once there’s data for 100 or more people.
Are Facebook Events still worth it for hotels?
For anything with a date, yes. Events hosted by a Facebook Page are public, can recur, and can be paid. People who respond to your Events can also be retargeted later with Meta ads.
Social media builds the desire to stay with you. Our hotel social media management service picks the platforms, makes the content and measures what turns into direct bookings. Get in touch to talk through which platforms fit your guests.