Is your Instagram account for your retail or interior design business an actual business profile? If not, as we head into another new year — a new decade — it might be a task you want to put on your to-do list.
Instagram introduced Business Profiles in 2016. As an extension of Facebook, emphasizing the visual element, the change makes sense. Just like a page for your Facebook business, an Instagram Business profile provides statistics and performance insights, among other benefits.
Here are five reasons to upgrade to Instagram business for your business. You can always keep that personal account as well!
1. Understand Your Audience
Instagram provides little in the way of analytics and performance statistics for the average Instagram user. This used to be a problem for businesses, so they created Instagram Insights for businesses and power users.
Instagram Insights provides businesses with the essential data they need about their account and post performance. You can learn what content works and what doesn’t. You also gain information about your followers to help you build a picture of those who have taken an interest in your Instagram feed.
In Instagram Insights, you’ll get week-to-week performance statistics, such as change in followers, number of posts, impressions, reach, profile views, website clicks, and email clicks. You also get detailed demographics of your followers – their gender, ages, locations by cities and countries, and when they are most active. Instagram Insight also lets you view historical posts by engagement and impressions over a custom time period you can set, up to two years.
For even more data, there are always additional analytics and software solutions as well.
2. Make Contact
Instagram accounts with a Business Profile can add a Contact button to the profile. When someone clicks on the button, you can set it so that they can email you, call, or access a map that shows your location.
3. Showcase Your Industry
When you created your Facebook page, you were asked to select the industry in which your business operates. Now, when you connect your Instagram Business Profile to your Facebook page, this information crosses to your Instagram profile. You can modify this information directly within Instagram if you need to in the future.
4. The potential to add Links in Instagram stories
One of the more frustrating challenges of Instagram is the inability to use clickable links in a personal profile. With a robust business profile and Instagram stories, however, that can change. While you’ll need 10,000 followers to qualify, once you’re there, you can add clickable links in Instagram stories. According to Locowise, 75 percent of Instagram users take an action after viewing a post with a link, such as visiting a website.
5. Advertise and promote your business on Instagram
You’ll need a budget and a Business Profile to advertise on Instagram. You build your ads on Facebook and choose where you want that placed. Instagram is one of the options Facebook gives you – the others are various positions on Facebook and Messenger. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid having a Facebook Page for your business, however, as operating a Facebook page is a requirement for being able to convert to an Instagram Business Profile.
What you’ll lose when converting
You will lose two features when you convert to a business profile, but the reality is that these features are intended for personal accounts, and you can always have one of those as well.
With an Instagram Business Profile, you’ll no longer be able to make post private. You’ll also lose the ability to link to multiple Facebook profiles. Instead your Instagram Business profile will link to your business’s Facebook page.
While these features may be of value to a personal account, they would have little if any use for a business account or for marketing. A business runs its Instagram account to help build an audience, and hopefully gain customers. And you can always maintain a personal account as well!
