Instagram is one of the most popular and valued social media channels so it’s important to make sure your profile is optimised to its full potential. It’s also a great platform for businesses of all sizes to utilise. It’s perfect for big businesses to engage with their audience, as well as being the leading platform for small business promotion. Here we take a look at how to optimise your Instagram profile to achieve the best results.
Create a Business Account
Did you know that over 25 million businesses use an Instagram business account, and it’s not surprising as there are many benefits and it’s free to change over. The biggest difference between personal and business accounts is that business accounts give you access to analytics. This enables you to gain valuable insights into analytics, such as post performance and follower growth. You can add office location and hours in a separate section, and include a contact button making it easier to be contacted either directly, by email or SMS. Also, Business Accounts allow you to ‘boost’ your posts. This is what Instagram calls their “paid promoted posts”. It’s quick and easy to change over to a Business Account in just a few clicks, but the benefits are worth it.
Create Your Bio as a Mini Business Pitch
When it comes to creating your bio you want to structure this as a mini business pitch, aiming to engage your audience and spark their interest. You only have 150 characters, so think about how you want to structure this to make sure all relevant information is included.
Utilise Hashtags in Bio
You can now include hashtags within your Instagram bio which allows creativity and opens up new opportunities. It’s a relatively new feature so it would be a good idea to experiment with this and use analytics to track performance. Don’t include too many hashtags though, as this can look spammy.
Profile Tracking Link
Instagram only allows you to include one clickable link within your bio, so you want to make sure it’s important and relevant. It’s a good idea to make this a trackable link so you know how many people are referred to your website from Instagram. If you have an Instagram business account then you will already be able to track this link. If you have a personal account you can easily do this using free online tools such as Bitly.
Quality and Engagement
Many believe that having a large number of followers is important as it shows credibility, however quality and engagement is far more important as there’s no point having lots of followers if none of them engage with your content. Put your focus into developing a strategy that engages your target audience as this will make a bigger impact in comparison to just trying to grow your followers.
Instagram Stories
In order to fully optimize your Instagram you want to make use of all the features available including Instagram stories, a feature that has taken off over the past few months. There are lots of tools within Instagram stories such as stickers and polls to encourage your audience to engage, but you can also use hashtags and location tagging to help your stories appear to a wider audience. Instagram stories allow you to be creative with your content and it’s also a great way to announce flash sales (e.g. 30% off for 48 hours) and new releases to your audience.
As you can see there are many ways in which you can optimise your Instagram profile. It would be a good idea to work your way through this list to make sure that your profile is as optimised as possible to achieve the best results.
If you would like some help setting up and managing you social media accounts, we offer social media services and you can find out more information here. Alternatively you can contact us at hello@cleverbusinesswebsites.co.uk or 01865 989899.
