The anatomy of a good business Instagram bio.
Since your Instagram profile is the new homepage, having a good Instagram bio for your business account is more important than ever to help you attract new followers.
Just like your goal is to convert visitors into customers with your website homepage, the goal of your Instagram profile should be to convert visitors into followers.
#1: Make Your Bio More about Them Than it is About You
Your Instagram bio is the first impression you make so making it easy to scan helps people quickly understand what your business or brand is all about.
It's only 150 characters so you have a limited amount of real-estate to attract prospective clients and customers. Like most marketing materials, a good rule of thumb is to focus your Instagram bio copy on how you help or inspire your ideal followers — making it more about them and less about you.
#2: Choose a Brand Logo That’s instantly Recognizable
It's important to make sure your profile photo is high-quality, not pixelated, and looks good on any device. Instagram’s dimensions for a profile picture on mobile are 110 x 100 pixels. However, profile photos are bigger on desktop, so we recommend uploading a larger pic, which Instagram will resize automatically.
#3: Use the Name Field to Add Your Targeted Keywords
The name field is a highly underutilized component of the Instagram bio. Your name is different from your username! Put another way, your name does not have to be the same as your Instagram handle.
The words you include in your name field are actually searchable on Instagram, making it a valuable piece of real estate. Try to think about the keywords that your followers are searching for on Instagram — maybe it’s your business niche or the products you sell. If you're a winery for example, rather than defaulting to your business name, consider adding winery or vineyard (when applicable) or your city name, like Napa Valley for instance.
Once you find the right keyword(s), put them into your name field by dividing it with a | or /. Keep in mind, you only have 30 characters to plat with.
#4 Share Your Brand's Hashtag
Placing hashtags in your bio doesn’t make your profile searchable within those hashtags, but adding your company’s branded hashtag into your Instagram bio is a great way to share your community and invite others to participate in it. We always recommend adding a CTA or encouraging fans to use your hashtag. A good example is "Share your [#brandhashtag] to be featured!" if using User Generated Content (UGC) is something you're hoping to capitalize on.
#5: Add a Call-To-Action for the Link in Your Bio
Instagram wants its users to stay on the platform so it's no surprise that the places where you can put URLs that drive the audience to external domains are limited. Therefore, your Instagram bio is one of the few opportunities to organically drive traffic to your domain or special offer.
Note: If you have over 10,000 followers, you can put a link in Stories and drive traffic from there.
Make sure your CTA is the last line in your bio. Emojis can help make the CTA stand out, emphasizes where users should click. We suggest these: 🔽, 📍, and 👇but get creative if your branding permits it.
#6: Make your Bio Link Work Harder For YOu
Fortunately, there’s a lot more you can do with your bio link than you might think. Rather than just sending people to a single page like your website, blog or shop page, we recommend utilizing a tool that allows you to link to more than one page of content.
Here are two of our favorites:
LinkTree: This is a free tool for optimizing your Instagram traffic, whether you’re a blogger, an artist or run a content platform. You’ll get one bio link to house all the content you’re driving followers to. This is super handy for folks who have an outdated website or cumbersome navigation. With LinkTree, rather than just using your company website as your link, you can create a simple landing page that list the top 5 places you want people to go - like shopping your inventory, your blog, joining your newsletter and more.
Linkinbio by Later: This is a great tool for ecommerce or brands or companies who pump out a ton of content like recipes. With Later, you can recreate your Instagram account on your landing page where you can add links to individual posts. So rather than having to constantly change the link in your bio (which doesn't really do you any good with how the algorithm works), it allows your followers to more easily shop for products or find the content you reference in your post. This is not a free feature but it's worth looking into, especially if you need an Instagram management tool as well.
If you are a brand or company who is using Instagram to build awareness and drive traffic to your website, your bio is one of the most important pieces of real-estate you can control. It's the first thing a potential fan will use when they are determining whether or not to follow you. MAKE IT COUNT!
About the Author: Founder. Dreamer. Master of None. It's been 9 years since Jules has been paying off her Masters Degree in Social Work—zero of which have involved doing actual Social Work. Instead, she's built a career decoding the puzzle that is the internet and digital marketing. Experienced. Humble. Often burned by auto-correct. Jules created Rolling Hills Media so she could write her own rules and to help brands do the same.