With around 500 million active daily users on Instagram, it will come as no surprise to find that this is a hugely powerful platform for all kinds of businesses. If your business doesn’t have a business account that it’s using to connect with the world – then it should. It’s reported that around 80 per cent of Instagram users follow and engage with other Instagram business accounts. People want to connect and be a part of the conversations around their favourite brands, and because of this, marketers are constantly looking to optimise and utilise Instagram for their business.
However, if you’re reading this blog, potentially you’re new to the idea of an Instagram business account – looking to find what boxes need ticking. Or perhaps you’re an experienced Instagram user, just looking to make sure you’ve ticked every box. Either way, this blog article is here to help.
We’ll be breaking down and looking into a whole list of profile basics and how best to set yours up to be looking its best, whilst also being as effective as it can be for your audience. With further ado, let’s get stuck in…
1 – Setting To Public, Not Private
We’ll start with a nice easy one. First up is making sure that people who find your account, can actually look at it. If you’re unaware, on Instagram, you can set your profile to private – meaning that only people that you allow to follow you can actually see your content. It might seem ridiculous, but it’s not completely unheard of that companies have accidentally kept their Instagram business account private without realising. You want your business account to remain as an open book, readily available and accessible for any potential customers to come, find out about what you do, and then, hopefully, if your content is strong enough, make further enquiries.
Ensuring that your profile is set to public/private is simple. Open “options” (the gear icon in the top right) and here you can choose whether “private account” is turned off or on.
2 – Easily Searchable Name & Username
If somebody has found out about your business, perhaps from a friend, or maybe through your marketing on another channel – they’re going to want to find out more about you. One place they might look is Instagram. This is great – however, if your username is too different from your business name, they’ll struggle to find you. This is why you need to make sure that you’ve secured a username for your Instagram business account as close to your business name as possible. Admittedly, this is often easier said than done. With billions of accounts on Instagram, finding a username that is unique can be difficult. So, if someone has already claimed the name your wanting, we suggest adding a word (like ‘gram’ for example) after the name – or potentially ‘official’ before the name. You basically want to find a name that people will see and still associate with your brand. What we don’t recommend is adding numbers after the name. TraceysCakes115 just looks unprofessional and unimaginative.
3 – On-Brand Profile Picture
Just like a shop-front sign, your profile picture is what stands out to your audience, and what they’ll see, first. Prominently displayed in the top left of your profile, your profile picture stands on display for the world to see and so should be immediately recognizable as your brand. The obvious, go-to solution for this is using your brand’s logo/name. Now there are different ideas and variations you can do with this but nothing will help reinforce your branding more than having your logo be the flagship icon anywhere online. Over time, you want your logo to become immediately recognisable and so creating that link between your logo and your content starts with your profile picture.
Another popular thing done with business logo profile pictures is tweaking them for particular holidays or referencing cultural events. For example, at Christmas time you could add a little Santa hat onto your logo (or something just as Christmas-y). Another thing businesses have been known to do is to reference certain causes or cultural happenings at the time. A prime example of this is countless brands adding the colours of the Ukrainian flag to their logo profile pictures. This is great for not only brand reinforcement but also demonstrating how relevant your business is – as well as showing off your beliefs and values. All through a profile picture!
4 – Link In Bio
If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes on Instagram, you’ve no doubt read ‘link in bio’ in someone’s caption. This is because, annoyingly, Instagram does not allow you to add clickable links to the captions of your content. Let’s say we wanted to shout about this very blog on our Instagram profile. There’s no way we could post about it with a direct link to it in the captions. We’d have to say something along the lines of “hey check out this blog. Link in our bio!” – but what does that mean?
Well, what Instagram DOES allow you to do is add 1 clickable link to your profile’s bio. So, what we highly recommend doing is adding a link tree (or one of its many competitors). A link tree is basically 1 link that goes to a directory of multiple links. So by adding 1 clickable link to your business profile bio, you can link that to your website, product pages, other social media pages – anything you want! This is great because it allows you to continually change these links to direct your audience to whatever you’re trying to push at the time.
5 – Consistent, High-Quality Content
This is potentially the biggest point of them all. This is because no matter whether you have all of the other points on this list down perfectly – if you’re not posting regular, high-quality content, you’ll struggle to draw in an audience. Coming up with a content strategy can be daunting, but fear not, it’s not impossible. In fact, in a previous blog, we covered the 5 most popular types of content for business social media marketing. You can use the categories mentioned in that blog to begin to map out a regular content plan. Once you’ve got the ideas formed, it’s then just about building the posts out in as professional a way as you can. A great and hugely popular way of producing high-quality content with minimal effort is using a tool like Canva. These content-building suites have countless templates for a range of different types of content and contexts for you to easily brand and send.
Another big thing to consider when it comes to creating content for social media is remaining on-brand. As we mentioned before about your profile picture, a lot of business social media is about brand reinforcement. As much as you want to be drawing in an audience and producing leads, you also want to be creating rhetoric around your brand so that over time, your brand (the colours, font, tone) are all immediately recognisable. It’ll also help your profile as a whole look and feel professional if the content that runs throughout it is all on-brand and feels coherent.
Conclusion
Whether we like it or not, social media is now a vital part of marketing. Your business profiles stand as representations of your business, open and available for a prospective audience to come across your content, engage with it, find out more, and become customers. So, if your profile isn’t looking as professional as its competitors, then that’s how it could make your audience feel about your business at large. The idea is to keep your profile clean and maintained, in the hopes of giving viewers that same impressive first impression as you would a physical store. Hopefully, this blog has given you a good starting point for levelling up your Instagram business account.
Did you find this blog useful? Well, here at Unaro, we’re all about assisting businesses with easier and smarter marketing. Check out some more of our super-helpful blogs, or follow us on Instagram for regular marketing, branding and business tips, tricks and insights.
