You don’t have to be a small business with a limited marketing budget and a smaller following, in order to have an Instagram Business Account! You can set up one even if you are a blogger, like me. It was created for large corporate businesses with unlimited marketing funds and a larger following where they need to see analytics about their visitors. For you or me, the analytics are crucial even if you promote your posts or not. Instagram offers much more clout these days, depending on your followers, you can start to increase your blog’s traffic.
Instagram business account
[source: www.canadacreate.com]
The Perks of an Instagram Business Account
I have been mad at HootSuite for putting a ridiculous limit to scheduled posts for free accounts. This, after they long ago reduced the maximum numbers of Social Media accounts monitored with one HootSuite account from five to three. HootSuite also cut off the Twitter Lists section and before that, the Klout number connection. Believe me, all this doesn’t help the speed or the waiting time. Besides, with a Pro account at HootSuite, you have now just some more Social Media accounts to add and you can manually schedule an “unlimited” number of posts. You don’t need that “unlimited”, you have your own limit, and you keep the freshness when you post, don’t you? You have to. Pro accounts also benefit from another scheduling method, very laborious and very limited, if you ask me. You create your posts on a text file, one after another, on different lines, and you feed the file to HootSuite. You can schedule some 300 posts. You work a day or two to put the “list” together and HootSuite denies it for one thousand reasons: dots, comas, repeating, this, that. After every time you have it submitted, you receive an “error” message, but with no explanations. The possible reasons are listed somewhere, in their FAQ or terms of use, I don’t remember now. Better, schedule manually and you’ll finish in no time. Even more, if you have a free account, how much time are you gonna spend to schedule a maximum total of 30 posts?
The real deal is that with HootSuite combined with an Instagram Business Account, you can now schedule (which on the long run means that you can publish) an Instagram post from your desktop, and that’s awesome. For that, HootSuite almost washed all its sins.
Other perks are the statistics. Analytics on posts and on the account as a whole are precious. Some more buttons appear on your page: E-mail, Phone, Address… They can not be seen on a computer’ screen directly, only on a smartphone or if you are really geeky, on a mobile simulation installed on your desktop computer.
How to Set Up an Instagram Business Profile
What will change when you switch to a business account:
- A “contact” button
- An analytics section (called “insights”)
- A “promote” button to turn your posts into ads
Before you get started you need an active Facebook Page (not your personal page) to link to your Instagram account, because when you’ll click to switch it will ask you to connect to your Facebook account.
It is very simple but for that, you need the smartphone or the simulation software I was talking about earlier (if you operate from desktop/laptop). Respect the following steps:
- Making the switch is pretty easy. Navigate to your profile in Instagram (for mobile), and under Account Settings, you’ll see an option called “Switch to Business Profile.”
- You will then be asked to log in to Facebook within the app.
- After that, you’ll be asked to select which Facebook page you want to connect. You must be an admin of the page you’re wanting to connect, and can only connect one Instagram Business profile and Facebook page together.
- Instagram will then ask which contact information you want to pull from your Facebook Page, such as customer service phone number, email address, or mailing address. A minimum of one contact is required to set up an Instagram Business profile.
Here are some tips to help you optimize your business’ Instagram profile:
To be “discovered”, your username on Instagram should match the username of your other branded social media profiles. The only other information that appears on your public profile is your website (a URL, which you can change to promote campaigns or new pieces of content) and a short bio. Use your bio to explain what you do and what people can expect from your Instagram profile. You may also include any branded hashtags you want followers to use, but that’s too technical for the moment. A nice bio will do good enough.
Downside
Facebook, the Instagram’s owner, changed some time ago the way that pages work. Facebook killed the naturally-ranked posts in your friend’s news feeds. Your followers are your potential “customers”, but if you look just for traffic, you don’t want to sell physical stuff on Facebook, you don’t need localization. For example, my target is represented by the English-speaking people, wherever they live. Unfortunately, they (Facebook + Instagram) don’t want you to show content to your “potential customers” for free, they want you to pay for it. They try to cut away the idea of social marketing, filling the streams with ad-centralized posts. It’s the same thing Google Plus did in a way a few years ago when every account owner was somehow “pushed” to endorse ads. It was a time when all Google properties were deeply connected, one for all and all for one, if you know what I’m saying. If you made a Gmail, you automatically owned a YouTube, a Google Plus, a Picassa, a Blogger, and so on. But what am I talking now, Google Plus died three years ago…
Conclusion
If you don’t wanna pay for ads, don’t pay. Depending on your goals, if you have an Instagram account and you also have a Facebook page, making an Instagram business account instead a personal one is precious. You made the page for your blog, so the page has a “business” status as well, but that was the same when I created it in the first place. The analytics are pure gold.
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