Instagram business accounts give businesses more opportunities than personal accounts. According to statistics given by Instagram, there are more than 25+ million business profiles and more than 200 million people visit at least one business account per day. 60% of those users have claimed that they discovered new products through business accounts on Instagram.
It is not difficult to run a business account on Instagram. It can be operated as easily as a personal account while enjoying some added bonuses. So, let’s see the differences between Instagram’s personal and business accounts.
What is Instagram business account?
At this moment, Instagram offers 3 types of accounts:
- Personal account
- Business account
- Creator account
Having a personal account is quite self-explanatory, the Instagram business account feature was launched in order to help businesses in expanding their reach, target relevant audiences, and generate genuine leads. A business account on Instagram offers a wide range of analytics and data related to the content that you share on the platform. However, this is not to be confused with the Instagram creator account, which is intended to help individual creators and influencers, while companies may also benefit from it.
In short, the Instagram Business Account helps you to promote your business in a way that’s supported by the platform by offering analytics and an ability to run ads to help you expand. It offers you things like putting a contact button (where you can put email or phone number), putting up your business locations so people can visit, and adding links to your Instagram stories.
Once you hit the 10k follower mark, you can add the swipe-up feature to your stories. This allows you to send people anywhere you want from Instagram. And in case you wish to use this feature before reaching 10k followers, you can run an ad and include a swipe-up link.
Features of Instagram business account
Personal profiles are all about the basic features, but business accounts on Instagram offer users access to a lot of additional features, such as contact information, Instagram Insights, promoted content, and the ability to schedule and publish your posts automatically with RecurPost.
1. View Insights
The insights that are provided by Instagram is one of the biggest perks of switching to a business account. In the analytics section, you will be able to find details about your performance, including followers, profile views, impressions, number of posts, reach, website clicks, and email clicks.
2. Run advertisements
Instagram utilizes the same powerful advertisement tools as Facebook, so with Instagram’s business account, you can set up, run, and monitor ad campaigns the same way you do with Facebook ads.
3. Promote your posts
Just like you boost a post or page from Facebook, it is possible to promote Instagram posts from within the app itself.
4. Tag your products
One of the most recent and best features of the business profile is the ability to tag products straight inside an Instagram post. This update means that business accounts can now share content with direct links to their product pages, making it super easy for users to click through, check out the products, and buy products. What’s even more, Instagram is rolling out a new checkout feature that will allow business profiles to sell their goods entirely from inside the Instagram app.
5. Give contact options
Using a business account on Instagram, you can let people contact you by placing a button on your profile itself. This button will appear below your bio section. For this button, you have the option to include directions, a phone number, or an email address.
6. Save quick replies
As a business, you will get quite a lot of DMs asking about the details and pricing of the products or services that you offer. In such cases, the quick replies feature will save you a lot of time and effort in answering repetitive questions. Quick Replies helps you to build messages for your most frequently asked questions so that you can address users in full by writing only one shortcut word.
7. Add links to Instagram stories
When you reach 10k followers on Instagram, you can add links to our stories and send people to your website or other landing pages. If you wish to add the ‘swipe up’ links before hitting 10k followers, you can do that by running ads. It enables you to create a direct route for sales and engagement from Instagram itself.
8. Completely automate your posting
If you want to completely automate the posting of content on your Instagram business profile, you can do so by using RecurPost! You can plan your posts in advance and schedule them to go live at a certain date and time. You can also create recurring posts and keep your content evergreen forever. RecurPost also allows posting on personal accounts and creator accounts through push notifications.
How to create Instagram business account?
Follow the below steps to convert a personal Instagram account into a business one:
- Log in to your Instagram account and go to settings
- Tap ‘Switch to Professional Account’
- Choose a category for your business
- Instagram will prompt you to connect to a Facebook business page (you need to have Admin access to the Facebook page)
- Fill out your contact details like email or contact number (make sure you include all the important information)