Platform Tips: Instagram

Now let’s talk about the Instagram bio. So in terms of the textural elements on your Instagram bio, it’s really important to be very clear and relevant to describe what you do. Don’t try and be too clever in the sense that it’s not very clear as to what you do or it’s some sort of in-joke that only people who are really close to your company will understand. It’s OK to use hashtags in your bio, but not too many, but relevant hashtags. And particularly, if you’ve got a branded hashtag that is relevant for your business, make sure you use that.

Always include your website link. At this point in time, the bio on Instagram is the only place where you can have a workable website link unless you are running an ad and you can put a link in then or if you have more than 10,000 followers, you can add a link into Instagram stories. But other than that, the bio is prime real estate and the only place where you have the opportunity to use a link. So make sure that you use that to its greatest advantage.

It’s also important to use emoji. So research has shown that people are more responsive and engage more on Instagram to content that has emojis in it. I’m not sure why, but that’s just what the research has said. So it’s really good to include an emoji. Doesn’t have to be like the laugh out loud or something really seemingly unrelated to your brand. It could be something that is in your branding colors or if you’re a florist or something like that, you could use a flower. Something that’s relevant.

And then you’ve got the highlights part as well. So it’s really important to make sure you use those. So highlights are from your Instagram stories where you can mark certain stories under certain categories. And those categories appear just under the bio. And you can actually use a tool like Canva to make sure that the names and the graphics you used to represent each of those highlights is consistent and looks professional as well.

Another thing to consider is that at sometimes a lot of businesses forget to do this. They forget to change their Instagram profile to be a business account. And so you can do this in the settings and why it’s important is because business accounts have access to a lot more analytics. So you’re able to learn more about the posts that are performing. You can learn more about the audience who are engaging and following your profile by changing it to that business account. So make sure that you do that so you get the most out of Instagram in that sense.