How did renowned brands manage to inspire millions around the world from their Instagram business account? In search of an answer, let’s go through some examples.
In May 2018, Lego paid homage to the British wedding with their own bridal scene made out entirely of toy blocks. Their reach skyrocketed just by seizing the momentum the hashtag #RoyalWedding enjoyed at the time.
Secondly, a recently branded hashtag that is energizing the creative community is #Adobe_Aerial. Through this keyword, Adobe is challenging graphic designers to a monthly theme. Customers pushed their limits for a chance to get featured on Adobe’s official account.
The aftermath of this Adobe campaign is a success in itself. Adobe managed to create high user engagement as well as fresh user-generated content just by engaging with their Instagram followers.
Having these two campaigns before your eyes, can you identify one similarity? It has to do with visual storytelling.
The recipe for success iterated for as long as Instagram is around points to a story woven around products. An engrossing narrative lends a new personality to an insentient object.
This way, it comes naturally to a target audience to connect with a brand at a personal level. The more people identify with a product, the higher the chances to not only initiate a purchase but also become brand ambassadors.
However, any brand story remains in its essence a type of business. In other words, companies need to quantify the activity around a visual and extract numbers from reactions.
This is where a business account proves how efficient it can be for companies. Instagram offers a suite of analytics tools based on which brands can make informed decisions.
So far, we only touched the bigger picture of how beneficial an Instagram business account is for brands. Let’s dive deeper into this topic and analyze all Instagram benefits for businesses.
Once you switch to a business account, Instagram will start delivering reports on followers. You can find these analytics in one of the premium features called Instagram Insights. To better serve companies, this report breaks down into three categories: Content, Activity, Audience.
This page is extremely helpful in improving a content creation plan. It shows you which posts, stories, and promotions perform the best judging by the number of views. Based on these rankings, you can prioritize those types of content that strike a chord with your audience.
Another outcome is improved time management. When they know exactly which creative doesn’t work for their community, brands save time by redirecting efforts to efficient strategies.
Moreover, businesses can leave their comfort zone and carry out experiments without jeopardizing the account. Get out there and try out the numerous ways through which users get familiar with a brand:
All in all, Content presents you with data on your activity. So how can Instagram benefit my business? At just one glance, you know what followers want to see more from your page.
A business Instagram account is also showing brands its profile traffic of 7 days. How many users are visiting your account in 7 days? How many of them are interested enough in your product to click on your website in bio? You’ll get accurate numbers for each of these questions.
There are 2 more metrics any company should keep an eye on: Reach and Impressions. In Instagram terms, reach is the number of unique accounts that view at least one of your posts. Impressions refer to the number of times users view all of your posts.
How can these metrics benefit your business? It all becomes clear when you combine the number of users that saw your posts and the number of likes.
A high reach metric but few likes? This means that a lot of people saw your post but few of them actually liked it. This is your signal that you have to improve your content to get a higher engagement rate.
Where would a company be heading without knowing the demographic data of its customers? One of the benefits of getting on an Instagram business account is access to Audience stats.
This type of data grants you a lot of benefits. First, companies discover first-hand information on who their public on Instagram is. See the top cities and countries that are most active on your account. Discover which percentage of Generation Z, Millennials, and Baby Boomers are among your followers.
Secondly, these statistics can further go into the creation of a social media user persona. Content creators can adjust their tone of voice, fine-tune image selection, and improve promotions just by visualizing their audience.
Next up is time. A business account keeps you updated with the hours and days when your followers were most active for the last 7 days. This is useful for post scheduling – send out your next big visual when your public is on the alert.
So far, we’ve seen how Instagram Insights is the core analytics tool that powers a business account. Nonetheless, there are other benefits of making the switch that adds to the overall value.
For instance, an Instagram business account has one essential feature that a personal one lacks: contact buttons. Under the bio section, users have the option to email and call the profile owner. Making yourself available for any inquiry at this level can only improve transparency and trust in the brand.
Companies can unlock these 2 lines of communication by providing an email address and a telephone number. After that, users have it easy to reach out to the brand.
Right now, the fastest way to turn Instagram followers into customers is with a “Swipe-Up.” This is actually the gesture users have to draw on their mobile screens to get to the webpage you linked to a story. In other words, an Instagram business account is now the golden ticket to client conversion.
However, there’s a catch. Brands must switch to a business account and have at least 10,000 followers. Only then can a profile embed a link to Instagram Stories.
Before this, the only means of guiding users outside the visual platform was limited to one call to action “Link in bio!” This alone makes the switch a strategic move!
Naturally, a business account means stepping into the promised land of Instagram advertising. Companies can streamline their ad creation by working directly on the mobile app. Choose a visual from your posts, open it, and click “Promote.”
Though building a promo is quick, getting the green light is what takes some time. This is because Instagram approves no ad before a complete verification of compliance with Instagram advertising guidelines. In some cases, it may even take more than a day to see your ad going live.
Moreover, Instagram lets businesses set up a number of criteria to personalize their ads. These include a CTA button, audience selection, budget limit, and a period of time to run your ad.
The truth is an upgrade to a business profile is going to have some features disabled. These remain exclusive to personal accounts only. In the end, it is up to you to decide whether such a loss impacts your business in a bad way or not.
First off, businesses don’t have the option to keep their accounts private anymore. This way, they have no control over who they are visiting them.
Such an account setting makes sense when the user wants to protect their content against prying eyes.
On the other hand, is privacy something a business really needs? As long as the purpose of an Instagram account is related to marketing, intimacy brings the company no value whatsoever.
One of the few disadvantages is that visitors will start seeing you as a company only. Your profile is marked with a business label. Usually, users translate this label as more persuasive and less social or inspirational.
Therefore, Instagram business accounts need to work harder right from the start to create a natural connection with followers. A practical solution to counteract this setback is to let go of sales language.
Stand by the formula that makes Instagram a magical platform for everybody: inspirational content. Flaminjoy found a way to introduce automation to the creative sector. Their solution consists of a smart engine that mixes your collection of UGC, brand visuals, banners, and other assets and creates original creatives ready to appear on Instagram Stories and web widgets.
With a business account, users can only see 7 days of data at a time. This means that without logging analytics manually, companies lose crucial information.
Nonetheless, this is not the end of the road. Startups with a focus on social media are already starting to address this omission. Flaminjoy is an intuitive solution that delivers weekly and monthly reports on brands’ content performance on Instagram.
All in all, there’s quite a slew of Instagram benefits for businesses. With an Instagram business account, brands unlock top-notch analytics that delivers actionable data, faster means of contact, new conversion methods, and a new advertising channel. How will you play this game?
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