Instagram Bio: What to Put and Why

With 8 million business pages, Instagram continues to be an excellent advertising avenue for brands to attract new customers and engage with the already existing ones. When a potential customer lands on your profile, they should be greeted with a bio that’s reflective of your brand’s personality and piques their interest.

An ideal Instagram bio should mainly serve the following purpose:

Communicate effectively about what your business is about.
Indicate how a potential or existing customer can get in touch with you.
Showcase your brand’s overall personality.
Compel the customer/reader to take an action.

You Instagram bio should contain the following components:

Profile Picture:
For starters, your profile page must incorporate a profile photo (for example, your logo or a product image) that’s relevant to your organization. Regardless of what you pick, make sure the picture not only looks appealing when somebody visits your profile, but also draws attention when it’s minimized in the feed. A few well-known brands and public figures also have a verified badge (the blue check mark) next to their profile picture to distinguish them as the ‘official’ account for easy recognition and to prevent impersonation.

Username & Name:
Your username appears at the top of your Instagram profile page and comes in handy when your customers or other business pages want to tag you in a post, caption or comment. While a lot of users experiment with their usernames by coming up with a funny wordplay or a unique phrase, as a business, you’re expected to be professional and easy to search for. Hence, it’s in your best interests to use the actual name of your business or an abbreviation of the same as your username. On a side-note, you can also change your username whenever you want – a feature that comes in handy if you revamp your brand identity in the future.

Your name shows up in a more noticeable spot right below your profile picture in bold characters.

Bio:
Instagram allows you to use exactly 150 characters to talk about your business. Don’t worry about including your contact information or address here, as business accounts are offered additional space to include those details. When you click on ‘edit profile’ followed by ‘contact options’ – you will come across the three separate fields to enter your phone number, email and location of your physical store/office. For example, let’s take a look at BlueStarDonuts’ Instagram profile to get a better understanding.

When a customer clicks on the ’email’ button, they are automatically directed to the default email app on their phone. Similarly, the ‘call’ and the ‘location’ buttons trigger the dialer and the map app, respectively.

Note: If you are not able to spot this particular feature in your account settings, you might not have upgraded your page to a business account.

You can also add hashtags (#) and link to your other social media handles in your bio, as well. If you have multiple Instagram pages (for example, Walmart Texas, Walmart Seattle and so on) people will be able to find all your ‘original’ profiles in one place, instead of searching for them individually.

For example, several ‘knock-off’ accounts on Instagram use ‘Adidas’ in their username, making it difficult for the official Adidas to stand out. Including their other accounts (based on location and products) in the bio helps to establish legitimacy. That being said, as a brand, you wouldn’t want a knock-off account to add links to your official account in their bio. The good thing is Instagram notifies you every single time someone tries to insert a link to your official profile in their personal bio, which you can choose to accept or deny. If you click on deny, your profile link will still show up in the other account’s bio, however, it won’t be hyperlinked.

If you want to direct your audience to a specific campaign you’re running or have run in the past, you can simply tag the post with a ‘branded hashtag’ and include it in your bio. Now, whenever someone clicks on the branded hashtag in your bio, they will be able to see all the posts that are associated with it.

While crafting your Instagram bio, don’t hold back from playing around with different designs, formats and structures to understand what goes well with your brand image. We highly recommend that you also track your profile analytics to find out the number of hits your website or a specific landing page is getting from the platform. In conclusion, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ for Instagram bios. What works for a competitor might not work for you, so change things up every once to find something that appeals to your target audience.

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