If you still haven’t switched to an Instagram business account, probably after reading this article you will think that a business profile is great thing and now it is the time to use it.
When you hear about Instagram business accounts, likely you have several question in mind, such as, what actually is it, how different is it from a personal Instagram account and why it is useful in managing Instagram profile.
In general, Instagram business profile provides you access to the analytics, scheduling and other big amount of various features. However, converting to a business account, you will lose an opportunity to make your Instagram posts private.
This is because there are different purposes of using Instagram accounts. A personal Instagram account is used to show the moments of your life to your friends and relatives, on the other hand a business profile is used in order to increase brand’s awareness, grow an Instagram target audience and hopefully get potential customers.
Let’s start to discuss all awesome features which you will be able to use if you switch to an Instagram business account.
1. Access to Instagram insights
This aspect is likely the number one reason why it is useful to start using a business profile. Tracking your performance with Instagram insights is some sort of analytical tools, which gives a detailed information about your followers’ demographic and geographic situation, the time when your followers are most active, changes of your followers’ quantity, number of your profile’s views, website’s clicks over the last week and many other things.
In other words, Instagram insights can help you to understand everything about your audience and to build strong marketing strategy in order to save your time.
When you have a clear and full picture of your Instagram analytical data, it helps to realize what you are doing well, what and how you need to change your Instagram strategy.
For instance, pay more attention to another target audience than before, change posting time or even began to upload new type of content. Or Instagram insights you can use just to monitor the number of likes and comments which your posts get.
What is more, if you have an Instagram business account, you may view all the analytical data which is related with your Instagram stories.
All in all, having access to Instagram insights is the key feature to evaluate your general performance, comprehend your target audience and optimize your content which attracts the followers.
2. Ability to schedule Instagram posts
In order to save your time writing engaging captions under your posts, Instagram business profile provides you an opportunity to use scheduling function. The process of scheduling your Instagram content is very easy because all you need to do is to choose the date and time when you want that a particular photo or video to be posted and it will be automatically uploaded to your feed.
The function of natively uploading the posts with Instagram app is still not available, so, due to this reason you can use other platforms which help to schedule your Instagram posts and upload them to your feed. Probably in the near future Instagram app will launch this perfect feature – ability to schedule posts.
However, now, in order to save your time and not interrupt your busy working day, apps which allow to plan the schedule when to upload your posts is the best solution.
3. Opportunity to have contact button
Another advantage of a business profile is a “contact” button, which provides your followers with an ability to contact with you in a more convenient way.
Probably you have a question, how it works? Actually it is very simple. Once you add your contact details, the contact button will appear in your Instagram profile. If users want to get in touch with you, they just need to click on that button. You can set preferred way of contact – users can email you or call you, or even find your location on a map.
In this case it will be easier and faster for the people to contact you without searching for a phone number or an email. However, if you are still in doubts about benefits of a contact button, according to marketing studies, when customers want to inquire about your product or service, firstly they will use a social media channel, not your website.
So, make it as convenient as possible to reach you and then you will avoid negative comments under your posts from some customers.
4. Ability to share clickable links in Instagram stories
One of the drawbacks of a personal Instagram profile is that the only link you are able to use in the stories is one in your account. However, from 2017 Instagram lets users who have a business profile add clickable links to the stories. Only one remark that in order to have an access to this feature, you need to have not less than 10 000 followers.
One interesting fact is that previously, the clickable links were only used by verified Instagram accounts. So don’t miss a chance to add clickable links to your stories by switching to a business profile. What is more, technique of using links will help to drive traffic to your website, blog or store and even increase number of sales. However, in order to encourage other users to click on a link you added, you need to add call-to-action.
Besides, according to the social media analyses made by Locowise, around 75% of people decide to take some actions, for instance, check a website or a store, only after seeing the Instagram picture.
So don’t reject an option of switching to Instagram business profile because as you can see the benefits are huge.
5. Chance to make sponsored posts and Instagram ads
Likely you have already noticed that advertisements occupy a big part of you Instagram feed. So, an Instagram business account provides you an access to promote your posts and put ads on Instagram platform, in this case helping you to increase the engagement level.
Actually, Instagram ads work in the same way as Facebook ads, they are very powerful marketing tool. However, from 2018 it is harder to receive high level of engagement without paid advertising. In this case, if you really don’t want to see the decrease of engagement, now it is the perfect time to start getting interested in how to optimize your Instagram account.
To begin with talking about Instagram ads, it should be mentioned that ads are created through Facebook’s self-controlled advertising platform, so in this case you will be the one who manages when and how ads should appear, who should see them.
Unlike promoted posts (which will be discussed later), Instagram ads are posted directly from you Facebook page. Instagram advertisements have the cost which depends on the factors, such as a day of the week when you post, demographics. Besides, it is self-controlled process and you are reaching highly refined Instagram audience.
What is more, in order to advertise using Instagram platform, you can use promoted or in other words sponsored posts. In this case you had to negotiate with influencers and ask them to promote your brand. Often it takes a lot of time on negotiations, expensive and reaches limited Instagram audience.
However, promoted posts are a great way if you want to attract potential customers or sell products, because there is the fact that people are more likely to purchase some products or services only when someone they trust bought it first.
All things considered, a business profile is a really good marketing tool provided by Instagram platform. It doesn’t matter if you are a company or a brand which uses Instagram to deliver its message in order to increase an awareness of its products/services, attract attention of potential customers and get new ones, or even if you are an influencer who is trying to build bigger target audience and increase account’s engagement level.
Anyway, Instagram business profile is always a great choice. From the features of a business profile that were discussed earlier you can see that it has a lot of advantages that completely confirm your decision of switching to it.
If you decide that you don’t like a business account’s features and they are not so useful for you, in this case you can switch back to a personal one at any time.
Although taking around one hour a day to schedule all your Instagram posts for a whole week won’t make your life a lot easier and less stressful, however it will let you to spend a bigger amount of time on engaging with your Instagram target audience which is significant if your aim is to generate the leads, get new customers, make sales or even just increase brand’s awareness.
