What do you really need to have in your Instagram profile for it to be effective for your business? Before we get started, make sure you actually have switched your profile from a personal account to a business account. This is the only way to see analytics on your posts and your profile. You can see how many visitors you’re getting, how many people are clicking through your bio, and more. If you haven’t done that yet, go ahead and do it now. I’ll wait for you. Then we can talk about the 5 must-haves for your Instagram profile.

A Great Profile Image

For starters, you need a great profile image. It’s perfectly okay to use your logo if you’re a business but ideally, you want a picture of you that gives people information about who you are and what you do. For instance, if you’re a realtor, it would be totally fine to have one of your sold signs as your profile picture. Remember to be consistent with your other branding. A good headshot with your branding would be great but a logo will always work as well. You want people to be able to easily recognize who the account belongs to and what you do.

The Right Handle

Your handle is your username. Picking the right one is important. For example, if you are “John Sells Homes in Hoover” on facebook, you can’t be “JohnSmith” on Instagram. It doesn’t correlate and people will have trouble finding you. Whatever your brand is on your website and your social media accounts needs to be consistent across the board. If your website is johnsellshomesinhoover.com and your facebook is “John Sells Homes in Hoover” then you need to be consistent on your Instagram. Instagram won’t allow a handle that long so you need to get as close as possible. You would need to choose a handle such as “JohnSellsHomes” so that when people start searching “John Sells Homes in Hoover” they find you. Your username should also make sense for what you do. 

The Right Name

You have to have to right name, not just the right username. What does that mean? It means if your company name is different from your username, you need to have the company name in your profile so people who are looking for you know they’ve found the right account. For instance, our handle is “staysocialu” but our company name is Social U, so we use Social U as our name on our profile so that people looking for Social U know they have found us. People search Instagram based on your name, so if your name is different than your handle, it’s a must to have it on your profile.

A Great Descriptive Bio

A great descriptive bio includes telling people exactly what you do. You can’t say something like “Making your lives better one day at a time.” That could mean you’re anything from a personal trainer to an accountant. You need to be very specific and it needs to speak to what you do. “I help people find their dream homes in Hoover” is a much better choice. 

Be super specific about what you do in your bio and include keywords, emojis, and line breaks. The keywords will help you get found and the emojis and line breaks will add visual interest. You don’t want to jam your entire bio into one paragraph. You want to spread it out so it’s easy to consume the information visually. For example, our company offers training, managing, and consulting so we have those broken out on different lines. 

Emojis are insanely helpful. They tell a story in pictures you couldn’t necessarily tell with words and they’re eye-catching. Instagram is a visual platform, so you want to make sure your bio is visually appealing as well. 

The Perfect URL

You only get to add one URL to your profile, so make it work for you. You could choose the URL that takes followers directly to your website and that’s great. However, ideally, you want to take your end-user to multiple URLs such as your Facebook page, a sign-up page for your next webinar, your blog, the sign-up page for your newsletter, and more. To take your end-user to multiple URLs you can use a program called Linktree. Linktree is very user-friendly. Just add the links you want your end-user to see to your Linktree account, then generate your Linktree URL. Add this URL as the URL in your profile. When one of your followers clicks the URL they will be taken to the Linktree page containing all of your links. Linktree has a free version and a paid version. The paid version allows you to add your own branding with custom colors and multiple icons. Choose the option that works best for you.

What Now?

There are many different elements that go into creating a great Instagram profile, but these 5 must-haves are a great place to start. Give your Instagram a quick checkup and see what changes you can make today to improve the effectiveness of your Instagram profile.