Why You Should Switch to an Instagram Business Account

Surely you’ve noticed on multiple occasions Instagram profiles of your favorite brands or photographers with an additional “Contact” button on their account page. Most of you are aware by now that these are Instagram business accounts that some folks have switched to, for marketing and promotion purposes.

No doubt, for any local small business or even international entrepreneur, the features that Instagram business accounts offer are of great value and use. Apart from the Contact button, which makes it super easy for followers or prospects to get in touch with you via phone, email or text – you also get access to a good deal of Insights (similar to those on your Facebook page). Insights will help you figure out who your followers are , when they are active, what they like and how to engage with them more. So here it goes, in this article we’ll analyze the perks of switching to an Instagram Business Account, and walk you through the process itself. Don’t worry, it’s quick and painless!

Why Should You Switch to an Instagram Business Account?

Mainly, for the following 3 reasons:
1. Easy to access Contact Information
2. Analytics
3. Instagram ads
Let’s go over each of the 3 key points in more details:

1. Easy to Access Contact Information

Up till today, Instagram remains one of the few social platforms which won’t allow you to include any clickable links or email addresses in your captions. The current trend is to keep adding new links into your website field, asking folks to follow the “Link in Bio” for more information. However, since Instagram was bought by Facebook, we started seeing posts in a non-chronological order. Now, all you see in your feed is determined by an algorithm based on things you’ve liked and engaged with previously. For this reason, by the time the “link in bio” gets to you, there might have been posted 2 additional images with new information and a new link in the biography section. Quite often it’s not even the website of the account’s owner, rather a link to an article they were featured in. So your follower has to take all these extra steps to find your website, find your about page and only then hopefully reach out to you. This is why, having a permanent Contact button on your account page is a huge huge benefit! Users simply have to click on it and choose whether they want to email you, call you, or find your location on the map (depending on the type of contact information you decide to share).

2. Analytics

Although there are not as many graphs and metrics as provided by your Facebook Page, Instagram does include a great and useful list of Insights that will help you analyze and understand your followers. Starting with demographics, impressions, post reach, popular posts, and ending with the days of the week and times of the day most of your fans are online and active.
You will discover that sometimes the content does not work, but other times it’s all about good timing. If you want maximum reach and engagement, post constantly and post at the right time.

3. Instagram ads

The Instagram Business Account makes ad creation a lot easier. Without a business account, you have to run your Instagram ads only through the Ad Manager on Facebook, with no possibility of boosting an existing Instagram post. However, after upgrading to the Instagram Business Account, a “Promote” button appears under each of your images. From there, you can choose a Call to Action button, set your budgets and time frames for your ad.

Now, that we’ve pointed out the main advantages of upgrading to a Business Account on Instagram, I’ll quickly explain how to do the transition.

How to switch to an Instagram Business Account

1. Open your Instagram app and your Brand/Business Page.
2. Access your Settings from the top right corner.

3. On your Settings page, under Account, you will find the option “Switch to Business Profile”. Tap on it. Instagram will quickly take you through a carousel of features you’ll get access to once you switch to a business profile. You can flip through the features (the ones I described above), or continue the switching process.

4. Connect to your Facebook business page. This is when Instagram will automatically pull information from your Facebook Page (type of business, contact info, etc).

5. Choose which type of contact information you want to use with your Contact button.
6. You’re done! Congratulations, you switched to an Instagram Business account.

Let’s explore your Business Account

Next to your Edit Profile button, you will also see a blue Contact button. If you tap on it, you will see the options your users are offered to get in touch with you. You can always go back, add or remove some of the information.

To access your Insights (analytics), click on the bar graph icon which showed up in your top right corner, next to Settings.
Note: You will not see any metrics for all your previous images. You have to post something after activating your business account to start seeing statistics.

After you have posted something, in your Insights tab, you will get details about the impressions and reach your post has gathered, the number of profile views and website clicks (displayed as this week/last week with the amount of increase or decrease).

Having posted a few images already, you will start getting information about your Top Posts, ranked by the amount of impressions each got.

Also, you can analyze your followers by gender, age, location and Instagram activity (by days or hours). Instagram also shows you how many new followers you gained since previous week.

Conclusion

Do Instagram’s Business Accounts look promising and helpful in terms of brand promotion and exposure? Can the analytics help you increase fan engagement for each posts? Most certainly! Will they have a similar outcome as our Facebook Business pages – where it was all fun and organic in the beginning, but then we noticed a significant decrease in free exposure, and we have to run paid ads to get more interaction? This is a scenario that should not be completely excluded. Facebook does own Instagram. Should this stop you from enjoying the perks of a business account while it’s still fun and new? Absolutely not!

If you have switched recently, let us know what you think and whether you are enjoying it!

Flothemes Team,
Empowering You.