Want to make a stronger first impression with your Instagram profile?
Wondering how to add branding and personality to your Instagram bio?
In this article, you’ll discover useful tips to help you build and optimize an Instagram profile for business.
How to Optimize Your Instagram Profile for Business by Olga Rabo on Social Media Examiner.
#1: Choose a Quality Profile Photo That Reflects Your Branding
First and foremost, your Instagram profile photo must represent who you are. For a brand, choose a brand logo that’s instantly recognizable. Your logo is also the easiest solution because it helps you stay visually consistent across all of your channels. However, if you’re an influencer, entrepreneur, or blogger, choose a picture of yourself that communicates who you are and what you do.
For example, Alex Strohl is an Instagram photography influencer and his profile photo depicts him holding a camera, taking pictures. Alex’s profile photo instantly conveys that his account is all about photography.
Similarly, Kori Nikkonen, a Berlin-based ballerina and fitness influencer, wears a flowy dress, ballet shoes, and a ballet bun that clearly reflect the lifestyle fundamentals of her brand. Like Alex, Kori shows a picture of herself that depicts her work in progress. Both images are memorable and resonate with the color palette of the person’s whole feed.
From a technical standpoint, make sure your profile photo is high-quality, not pixelated, and looks good on any device. Currently, Instagram’s dimensions for a profile picture on mobile are 110 x 100 pixels. However, because profile photos are bigger on desktop, upload a larger pic, which Instagram will resize automatically.
#2: Include a Keyword With Your Name
To ensure people can find you, make sure that the name you share on Instagram is in fact your name, not your Instagram username. Because people who search for you on Instagram will use your real name or your company’s name, matching your name to your Instagram handle decreases your searchability.
Because Instagram users also search for keywords, putting a keyword in your name triples your searchability scores. Even if your username doesn’t contain the keyword, people can still find you through the keyword in your name. For instance, Aniahimsa appears in this Instagram search for “vegan” even though the word “vegan” isn’t part of her official Instagram handle.
To choose keywords for your name, think about the target keywords your potential followers might use to find inspirational accounts, cool hashtags, or specific locations to follow.
To illustrate, if you want to attract a target audience based in Berlin, add the word “Berlin” next to your name. Then people can find you by typing the name of the city in the People search bar.
Similarly, if your followers look for Instagram coaches, put “Instagram Business Coach” next to your name. If your followers look for interior inspiration, add “Interior Inspiration” next to your name.
After you choose your keywords, adding them to your Instagram profile is simple. In a desktop browser, open your profile and click the Edit Profile button. In the Name field, type your keyword after your name. You may want to separate your real name and your target keyword with an emoji. (Find out more about emojis a little later in this article.)
#3: Incorporate Target Keywords in Your Description
Because your Instagram bio has less time than an eye blink to make a great first impression, making your bio easy to scan helps people quickly understand what you’re all about. For optimal scanning, target keywords are your best friends because they clarify what kind of content people can find on your account.
As an example, with a quick glance at Iris Dijkers’ bio, you can see her Instagram content focuses on fashion, travel, and lifestyle. These focus points introduce her account and might also determine whether people click that Follow button.
You should also take advantage of Instagram’s recent feature that enables you to add hashtags and profile links in your bio. It’s a perfect place to promote your branded hashtag. Because people can follow your hashtag, your community includes not only your account followers, but also the tags and follows of your branded hashtag.
To add hashtags and profile links to your Instagram bio, open your profile page and click Edit Profile. In the Bio field, add the hashtags and profiles you want people to associate with you. Don’t forget to use the # character for hashtags and the @ symbol for usernames. After you save and exit, the hashtags and usernames become clickable so people can check them out.
Using keywords from your niche that your target audience understands will make it clear what you stand for, what you have to offer, and whether or not your account is relevant to them. Choose keywords that reflect your strongest skills or interests that you want to highlight on your account.
Tip: To choose the right keywords, look at accounts similar to yours and consider what sets you apart from them. Do you have something unique to offer? Do you have a different interest to add to your skill set? Your bio is a place to put forward your best skills in the strongest combination.
#4: Add a CTA Before the Link to Your Blog or Latest Offer
Because Instagram wants its users to stay on the platform, the places where you can put URLs that drive the audience to external domains are limited. However, driving traffic and measuring your website clicks are important Instagram metrics for business.
Currently, if you have over 10,000 followers, you can put a link in Stories and drive traffic from there, but this tactic obviously doesn’t work for smaller accounts. Your Instagram bio is your only opportunity to organically drive traffic to your domain or special offer.
For instance, Tyler J. McCall, an Instagram marketing strategist, has a URL to his latest offer and highlights the URL with emojis around his call to action (CTA), which makes the offer even stronger.
To add a URL to your bio, click the Edit Profile button and add your URL in the Website field.
To add a CTA above your URL like Tyler J. McCall does, make sure your CTA is the last line in your bio. Emojis make the CTA stand out, and most people opt for the down-arrow emojis to emphasize where users should click.
Tip: In your bio, a link to a website or a blog post is a great start. However, if you promote various offers every week and want to send followers to specific product pages, constantly changing the links in your bio becomes challenging. For a workaround, check out Linktree, arguably the best tool out there to add multiple links to your Instagram bio.
#5: Use Line Breaks, Emojis, and Custom Fonts to Fine-Tune Your BioAfter you cover the fundamentals (like keywords, URLs, and cross-promoted hashtags), add some personality to your bio as a final touch. For example, add a favorite quote you live by or share a funny line that represents your brand well. To illustrate, Lauren Bullen includes the phrase “Let’s Get Wander-fully Lost” on her travel account.
Notice that the line breaks also make Lauren’s profile easy to scan. To add line breaks, tap Edit Profile and then tap Bio. In your bio paragraph, tap Return wherever you want to add a line break. Although the line breaks don’t appear on desktop, you can also add emojis to split the text into parts.
Emojis can also visually highlight specific keywords and make your bio even more scannable. Emily Skye, a fitness influencer from Australia, runs three accounts on the side: one for her newborn baby, one for her workouts, and one for her makeup tutorials. The emoji before each account link visually communicates the focus of each account.
To add emojis, click Edit Profile and enter your desired emojis in the Bio section. Just don’t go wild with too many emojis! Stick to the ones that visually communicate key information about the text.
A custom font can also add a creative touch to your bio. With the iOS app Textizer, you can customize the font in your bio, and many of the fonts are free to use. To use Textizer, open the app and click Get Started. Choose a font from the drop-down menu and type your text. It will appear in the font you selected, as shown in the example below. Then click Share to copy your text to your clipboard.
Return to Instagram, click Edit Profile, and paste the text where you want it to appear, such as your Name or Bio section.
Bonus Tips for Business Profiles
If you’re doing business on Instagram, an Instagram business profile is a must because it helps you build a brand and appear professional. With a business profile, you have access to insights and analytics that help you make data-driven decisions. You’re also able to add a business category, contact information, and action buttons to your bio.
Check out these bonus tips for business profiles.
Choose the Right Business Category
Your Instagram business category is the same as the category you picked for your Facebook business page, which you need to use Instagram for business. For instance, on Facebook, ZARA is categorized as “Clothing (Brand)” on its Facebook page.
On Instagram, Zara’s business category is exactly the same.
To add more specificity to your Instagram bio, you can modify your Instagram business category. On mobile, click Edit Profile and scroll down to the Business Information category. You’ll see the Facebook page that’s linked to your Instagram profile and the category that was automatically pulled from your Facebook page.
Tap the Category option to see other categories that you can choose such as Books and Magazines, Events, TV, Film, Local Business, Brands and Products, Music, Public Person, Sports, and so on. After you choose the category that best fits your business, you can select a subcategory from a drop-down menu. The subcategory is what appears in your Instagram bio.
Add Contact Info
To help Instagram users get in touch, you can add your email, phone number, and address. Tap Edit Profile and open the Business Information section. Then tap Contact Options to see the Email, Phone, and Address fields. Any field you fill in will appear on your Instagram bio.
Tip: Don’t make all of the contact options available because that cuts off important information in your bio and forces users to click the More option (the three dots icon), unnecessarily extending the user journey.
Choose Action Buttons
An action button connects your Instagram profile with other online services such as Yelp or Eventbrite so your customers can take actions like buying tickets or making a reservation without leaving your Instagram profile.
Click Add an Action Button and choose the online service you’re using to do business. Then click Next, add the URL that your business uses, and click Done. When you finish, the new action button appears in your bio.
Keep in mind that your action buttons appear in the same place as your contact info. Avoid having so many that they don’t all appear in your profile.
Conclusion
Although your Instagram content and captions are important, your profile is the first impression you make on the platform. With the limited time you have to make that impression count, use the tips in this article to tweak your Instagram profile and improve the return on your efforts.