Tag Archives: Instagram bio

How to stand out on your Instagram bio

Your Instagram bio is the first thing visitors to your Instagram account will see. You have 150 characters to introduce yourself to your audience, let them know exactly what you do and how you can help them, and to engage them. It seems a bit overwhelming to try and so all this in just 150 words, but this blog post will help you…I’ve got your back!

You need to write a bio to create a good first impression and also to give your readers a reason to follow you, like and share your content…and ultimately convert them to customers.

What are the main elements of a good bio?

The main elements and objectives are:

  • Descriptive and keywords in your profile name
  • Tell your readers what they can expect from your page and what’s in it for them
  • Include a good call to action (CTA). This is basically telling your audience what you want them to do next
  • Include a link to your website or blog
  • Use line breaks and emojis, as this makes it much easier to read

Your profile photo

Your followers want to know who you are and what you look like. I always suggest a photo of yourself (not your pets – this is your business page!) Make sure the image is clear and use a head shot if possible.

If you really don’t like using your photo, lots of people use an image of their logo.

User name and display name

Make sure your user name field is optimised with your name and a searchable keyword. Your Instagram handle is your user name – for example, my Instagram user name is ‘Cindy Mobey Marketing’ It gives my name and what I do.

If you were a hairdresser, you could put your name and then ‘hairdresser’ or ‘hair salon.’ This helps with searches that people make.

Your Instagram display name is the name people will see at the top of your Instagram bio when they visit your profile. Mine is my full name – Cindy Mobey.

Business Category

Your business category shows under your display name. When you input this on Instagram, it is via a dropdown box. The categories are quite limited, so you’ll need to find a category that best describes your business. For me, the nearest and most accurate category I could find was ‘Internet Marketing Service’.

Description – Highlight your skills

This is the most important part of your Instagram bio. It informs your audience about what you do. Think of it as your pitch to your customers and include details about what you sell, or what service you offer.

Incorporate line breaks, bullet points and emojis to help your bio stand out. Keep it concise and to the point. Depending on what you do, you can be creative with this, as well as saying what you do on the tin. Above all, try and let your personality shine through!

For example, if you were a Social Media Manager, you might put something like..

  • Social Media Management
    Helping beauty, wellness and skincare businesses grow

Or if you do something specific in that field…

  • Social Media Management made easy
  • Videography & photography

Some people include where they are based.

Use relevant keywords

Use keywords that are relevant to your business. This helps you connect with your followers and helps describe what you do.

Keywords could include your values and interests and those of your target audience, so you attract them into your feed.

If you were a business selling nutrition, for example, you could include keywords such as ‘wellness,’ ‘nutrition,’ ‘self-care’ etc. You get the idea.

Call To Action (CTA) & relevant link

A call to action or CTA is simply telling your reader what you want them to do next. Do you want them to visit your website? Go and browse your online shop? Read your latest blog post? Sign up to your newsletter?

ALWAYS include a CTA at the bottom of your Instagram bio and include the relevant link. Instagram currently only allows one link, so if you have all of the above, it’s a great idea to sign up to something like Linktree which is a tool that allows you to share multiple links on social media. This is especially good for Instagram, due to only one link allowed in your bio – you can just publish your Linktree link, and when your followers click on it, they can see all your other links to website, shop, blog, newsletter sign up, and you can link to other social media pages too.

Contact details

You can also add your email address, telephone number and the actual physical address of your business too. Your contact details don’t take up your character space, so that’s a bonus, and you can choose whether contact details are visible or not. If you agree to them being visible, contact buttons will be added to your profile.

Highlights

If you haven’t heard of highlights and don’t use them on your page, take a look at my bio – you will see that I use highlights to give more information about myself and what I do. Highlights are underneath your profile.

When you publish a story on Instagram, it only remains visible for 24 hours, then it is automatically archived.

Instagram Highlights allow you to save and categorise your stories on your profile so followers, new and old, can still view and interact with past stories, well after that first 24 hours expire.

Recap

Once you have your Instagram bio set up, it’s worth asking some of your friends, family, and peers to have a look at it. A good bio will create a fabulous first impression and convince your audience to follow you and engage with your posts. So, you need to:

  • Tell who you are and what you do
  • Use keywords to target your ideal audience
  • Add a link to your website or blog
  • Complete the email and telephone fields so your audience have other ways to contact you

And, above all, show your personality. It’s worth spending time and effort into your bio to get it exactly right. The joy of your bio is that you can change it over time – make sure you review it every couple of months and make adjustments, checking your links work, so it’s always up to date and continually improving.

If you need help with writing your bio, or are not sure what you can include, feel free to contact me – cindymobey@outlook.com I’m happy to help.

Capture your audience with a fabulous Instagram bio

If you’re on social media for your business, you’ll know that there are millions of similar businesses to yours out there.

Research tells us that someone browsing online will make their mind up about you and your business within seconds. This doesn’t give you much time to impress those browsers. This is where your all-important Instagram profile is crucial – you need to find a way to capture that audience as quickly as possible.

To capture that audience, you need to be both creative and have a strategy.

Here are a few steps you can take to help you grab their attention.

Choose an image

For your business Instagram profile, you can use either a photo of yourself or an image of your logo. Either works well. I prefer to see photos, so I know the person behind the business, but either is acceptable.

Optimise your Instagram name

First of all, your name. Make sure that this is optimised with your name and a searchable keyword.

For example, say you are a photographer and specialise in new-born and family photos. You could include what you do in the name field – Jane Doe, newborn, and family photographer. Then in the category, you may choose to use Photographic Studio. This tells your audience what you do and that you have a dedicated studio for your photography.

Ensure you use a keyword that your audience are likely to search for and what you are known for.

Tell your audience about your skills  

This can be difficult and takes some planning as you only have a limited number of characters to use to get your message across.

This section needs to cover what your business is about and who you are targeting.

Reiterate what you do. You could use a mix of sentences and bullet points to entice people in and giving them a bit more information about you. For example…

Make lasting memories of your newborn & family.

  • 10yrs exp
  • South England
  • Book via website
  • Natural photos to treasure

This is very simple and straightforward but highlights exactly what Jane Doe does on the tin.

In the profile you can add a link, so add one to your website if you have one.

Use relevant keywords/phrases

Although Instagram won’t use these words or phrases in any searches, as searches are conducted on your name and username fields, using keywords can help you connect to your target audience and appeal to emotions. In the example above, think ‘lasting memories,’ ‘newborn,’ ‘family,’ ‘natural photos to treasure.’ They are all things we’re looking for if we want family photos.

You do need to know your target audience, so this is where a bit of work comes in to determine who they are, what they want and how you can give it to them. Your keywords or phrases will address their pain points and give them a solution to what they’re looking for.

Drive traffic to your website

As I mentioned above, your profile can include a link to your website. Although it is planned to be able to use more than one link in future, now, you can only use one.

So how do you choose? You might have a website, a blog, or an Etsy shop. You might also have a link to sign up to your email that you’d like to use. But you can only use one link!

You can opt for just one, or you can sign up to something like Linktree. It’s free to sign up and works by you creating a landing page on the Linktree site, which features multiple links to your other sites. You simply copy and paste your Linktree landing page URL into your Instagram bio and instantly your followers have access to all the things you do.

The only time I would change the link on your bio from Linktree, is if you are running a special promotion or offer. Then I would advise to change the URL to go directly to your shop, landing page or wherever your audience can get instant access to your offer. Sending them to Linktree, and another step in a chain to get to what they want, may put potential customers off. If you have an offer on, they want to get there as soon as possible.

Have a CTA (call to action)

Linked to driving traffic to your chosen link is a CTA (call to action). Put a sentence that tells people what to do…visit my shop, for example with an arrow pointing down to your chosen link.

Add your contact information

You can add your contact details to your business profile on Instagram. This includes your email address, phone number and actual address.

The best part about adding these is that it doesn’t take up any character space in your bio!

Be creative!

Once you have all the information that you want to convey to your audience, use any extra characters to be creative. You can use emojis, either just for fun, or to highlight bullet points or your CTA.

Use hashtags

Instagram always encourages its users to make use of hashtags. A hashtag, such as #newbornphotographer is used to categorise content and make it easier to find. You can click on hashtags and Instagram will show you a page that shows all posts tagged with that hashtag. So, it’s useful for getting your page found.

Instagram tells us that we can use the maximum number of hashtags in every post, which is 30, and up to 10 on a story. If you try to include more, your comment or caption won’t post.

But just because you can use 30 hashtags, it doesn’t mean you have to. There’s no right number, but the general opinion I’ve seen recently is that 10 or 11 is good for posts and just a few on stories. It’s best to do a bit of trial and error to see what works best for you. I tend to use around 10-12.

Conclusion

Who would guess there is so much to think about when doing your bio? As a quick recap, your Instagram bio or profile is the first things visitors see, so it’s important to make a good first impression.

Follow the simple steps I’ve mentioned, and you should be on the road to making that good impression. It’s worth taking your time to get it right.

Once you’re happy with it, show it some of your friends, or ask people in one of your networking groups to have a look and give you some feedback.

And remember, it’s not a ‘do it and that’s it’ thing either. It’s a good idea to revisit your bio every few months to make sure that it is still relevant to what you do, and still aimed at your target audience, as things can change.

Check out my blog page for more marketing help and tips to help you grow your small business.

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