OMG I finally got the Instagram business account update!
For those that don’t know: Instagram announced a series of updates that would be rolling out over the next year. You probably hear about the changes in your feed (no longer solely based on chronology, but also on how you engage with people, making it more similar to your Facebook feed), they also announced they would be rolling out Business Accounts!
How do you snag a business account?
when you login one day it will look like this photo to the left, you will need to link your Instagram account to your Facebook account, which you can do in the options section of IG, scroll down to settings, and click “linked accounts”. You can also do it through your Facebook business page, but eventually you will have to do it here on Instagram so just start there.
From there it's just a waiting game, they seem to be rapidly expanding the people who can switch over every day! All we know is it's available to the US, Australia, and New Zealand first.
Why is this so exciting?
Three big changes come with the business account: contact button, easy promotion, and analytics.
You can now take your contact info out of your precious bio space (you only get 240 characters for your bio on Instagram,nonen of which is clickable) so it’s really annoying to waste it on your email. Business accounts have a contact button next to their follow button which allows people to call, text, email, or get directions to you. As a business account you can add all of that info or just some of it or none of it.
*There seem to be some glitches with the contact button, as reported it takes a little bit of time for some people to see it on your profile. But those that do see it, it works smoothly for.
Promotion: I’ve never “boosted” a post on Facebook or run an Instagram ad, mostly because I would get halfway through the process and get frustrated and give up. Now Instagram has made it really easy to do everything in the app rather than having to go to the Facebook ad center like it was before to create an Instagram ad.
*Currently it was reported to me that one person tried to “promote” their post and there are some glitches.
Basically, you can go to the photo click the promote button (picture 1), then you are prompted to picture two to select all the details of your promotion. The last picture is where you can see all of your past promotions, this is located always at the top of the “heart” screen.
Analytics! These things are powerful! Seriously, I am obsessed with them! Finally we can see what time of day your followers engage with you, plus which days of the week are better for engagement. You can also see the impressions, reach, and engagement per post. Impressions are how many times your post was seen, reach is how many people saw it (for instance you could have a reach of 100 people, who saw it 3 times each making your impressions 300), and engagement is the number of times people engaged with you. So the average engagement on an Instagram photo is 4%, but now you can probably increase that number when trying to pitch brands because you can actually tell them how many people saw your photo and what the percent engagement is like based on those people (Instagram reports that on average people miss 70% of their feeds!) For example, if you have average 40-50% engagement based on the number of people who saw your photo compared to maybe a 1% engagement based on followers, that could make you more enticing to work with if you have a really large following that just isn't seeing your photos.
The next part of analytics is it shows you your demographics! Male vs. female, age ranges, and locations, and pictured below is days of the week your followers are typically most active.
*Analytics are also lagging a little. I clearly had engagement from 20+ people on a photo when I first posted it and it reported only 13. It balanced out after an hour, but overall it seems there are still some glitches with the new accounts. Nothing major, and they seem to be sorting themselves out after a few days.
I always wondered how many people actually saw my photo so I have found this particularly exciting.
There is a lot of chatter lately about the power of the mid-level influencer and Instagram takes a lot of work, so as crowded of a space IG is, it’s really important to crack the code sooner rather than later and start branding yourself as a mid-level influencer if you are trying to work with brands or monetize your Instagram. I would definitely recommend linking your Instagram to a Facebook business page (this will make you eligible a little quicker supposedly for the update, but IG is historically very quiet about changes and how they do things).
Grab my checklist of tools that helped me grow my Instagram following by 2500% in less than four months!
