Optimizing Business Profile Settings on Instagram

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Video Transcript | Intro

Although it‘s possible to use a personal Instagram account for your business, business accounts offer unique benefits that allow you to engage with your audience more effectively.

Business accounts allow you to add contact and industry details to your profile – making it easy for viewers to get in touch with you directly through the app. You must include at least one contact option, in the form of an email, phone number, or street address. These details are used to create the calls to action on your profile. 

Creating your Instagram Bio

On Instagram you have just 150 characters to create a memorable and informative bio. Take advantage of Emojis to help you get to the point quickly, using symbols to represent important facets of your organization. This is also a great spot to highlight a branded hashtag for your fans to use when sharing images. 

Instagram doesn’t offer many options for formatting your bio within the app, so to work around this, draft your bio using the notes app on your device, then paste your formatted copy into the bio field. This will allow you to add line breaks, keeping your bio easy to read. 

The website field is the only spot on Instagram where you can include a clickable link. Use the best page for potential visitors to land on – like your blog or online shop – or create a custom landing page meant just for Instagram users.  If you’re running a campaign, consider temporarily changing the link to a campaign-specific page to support it.

Remember: Most people use Instagram on a mobile device, so any destination you choose should be completely optimized for the mobile experience. 

Setting your Account Settings

In your account settings, be sure to connect accounts such as your business's Facebook or Twitter page, so that photos you share can be easily cross posted to your other profiles. 

Monitoring Tagging and Comments

You should also keep an eye on how others are interacting with your profile and content. Instagram allows users to tag others in their photos. Photos in which you’re tagged are accessible to the public from your profile. Reviewing these pictures is a great way to discover content from your customers, and ensures the photos you’re tagged in are appropriate for your brand. You can choose to manually approve tagged photos, hide them from your profile, or remove individual tags entirely. 

Users can also comment on your photos. While the majority of comments received are positive, you can take steps to hide inappropriate comments using a pre-set list supplied by Instagram, or based on custom keywords you select. 

Instagram Stories

If you’re planning to take advantage of Instagram’s Stories feature, you can opt to configure which followers see your stories, who you will accept replies from, and if you wish to save the photos you share to your device’s camera roll.

Using Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights, an analytics feature available only to business accounts, provides actionable metrics about what content resonates best with your audience based on your content’s reach, impressions, and profile views. Insights also gives you additional details about your followers, such as the times of day when they are most active, their age range, gender, and location – all of which you can use to tailor your profile and activity for optimum engagement. 

Looking for more? Checkout our blog for the 6-step guide on how to use Instagram for business!