10 Tips to Optimize Your Instagram Business Profile

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Businesses are taking Instagram by storm. Think about it… between mommy bloggers, foodies, travel junkies, and the hundreds of Harry Potter fan accounts, the latest updates, though fun for personal accounts, seem to benefit business profiles the most.

Since Instagram’s launch in 2010, the industry and usage have both shifted from the fun, personal account into a bigger push into business and sales. As a growing platform, good changes need to be made in order to attract new users and retain the current ones. In August of 2016, Instagram provided users with an option to create a business account that allows the businesses (and users if they desired) access to analytics and options for e-commerce.

As Instagram continues to release update after update, it’s important to optimize your profile and take advantage of those features. Here are ten ways that you can improve your business profile.

Engage with Your Followers

Engagement is a key part of IG’s algorithm. The more engagement you receive on your posts, the more likely your profile is to be seen. Instagram likes it when you, as the profile owner, engage with your audience. The quality of your followers is valued greater than the quantity of your followers. And remember, the quality will lead to more quantity.

Create Discoverable Content

An article by Rival IQ, suggests that you ask your users not to tag your photos, but instead to use a custom hashtag to make your content more discoverable to those that may not follow you. This concept makes sense due to the fact that when you’re tagged in a photo, only those who are already following your profile will see it, but hashtags make it available to a broader audience.

Strategically Share Content

What you share, when you share it, and how you share it matters. Create a content calendar and plan out your content in order to accurately tell your brand’s story. The visuals you post and the captions you use create a brand experience, and you want to make sure you’re properly conveying the right one for you.

Create Captivating Captions

Instagram shows the first two lines of your caption – choose your words very carefully. With ten or so words, you’ll have to captivate your audience quickly and get them to click the “more” to view the rest of your caption. How you’ll accomplish this completely depends on the industry you’re in, but experiment and try new things.

Utilize Instagram’s New Features

Why would IG come out with new features just for you to ignore them? The new features may not apply to every business, but it can be argued that every new feature is designed to increase engagement. Especially utilize the new features that stories have offered. Polls, Q&As, stickers, gifs, countdown timers, etc. are all there for your benefit. Take advantage of them. IGTV is an up and coming resource for your followers. It gives you the opportunity to upload up to 10-minute long vertical videos that a mommy blogger could use to showcase her latest unboxing or your company can upload a tips & tricks video that’s applicable for your business.

Go Live

Using Instagram’s Live feature is going to benefit your profile. The algorithm is set to favor a user when they go live, notifying its followers and trying to get you seen by the most amount of people.

Build a Trackable URL for Your Bio

Creating a URL that you can track will help you to get the necessary data to continue to optimize your Instagram Profile. Building your URL can help you discover where traffic is coming from, how many people click on your link, etc. This principle can also apply to other platforms, in fact, I’d suggest creating a separate URL for all different platforms to gain more insights. We use Google’s Campaign URL Builder to set up individual URLs for different platforms. We are also able to track the data in Google Analytics. Here’s a guide on how to use Campaign URL Builder and a Youtube video to teach you how to use this tool.

Fine Tune Your Bio

Use keywords. Add them in your description, use special fonts and emojis. The idea is to do something to stand out and make your purpose clear. Add a call to action to your bio. The key is not to make it too busy. Oftentimes, influencers and those similar make their bios too busy. Use fancy fonts sparingly and make it clean. Your bio is one of the first things people read about your brand, make it count.

Utilize Influencers

Partner with other brands or people. Optimize your brand and use people that would benefit your company and those that can benefit from you. Remember that they’ll be adding value to your brand and you will have to add value to them in some way. Influencer marketing is growing and Instagram is one of the best platforms to use this marketing technique.

Be Authentic

Be you. Social media has received a lot of hate the past couple of years regarding the “appearance of perfection.” This is your opportunity to change that perception. Be authentic and allow your audience to see the raw parts of your brand.

As one of the fastest growing social platforms, Instagram is constantly adding new features and changing its algorithm. Staying on top of what is happening with the social channel is one of the best things you can do for your business. Don’t fall behind! Following these tips will help your Instagram business stay fresh and visible.

Understanding Facebook Analytics

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” -Sun Tzu

Most intermediate to advanced marketers love diving into tactics. It’s sexy and it brings this sense of “ah…that’s what I have been missing all along” feeling that also makes you feel like you have stumbled on some “holy grail” of marketing that will catapult your marketing efforts into the next stratosphere.

The problem is that most of your marketing issues have nothing to do with your tactics, but your lack of a cohesive strategy in implementing those tactics. So the question then remains, how do you put together a cohesive strategy?

Analytics and Facebook analytics specifically will help you better understand the user experience as they interact with your brand both online and off. How do new users find about your business/product/service? How do your existing customers become loyal, repeat customers?

Every business, especially if they have a heavy online presence, needs to refine their critical path for their new customers. What user flow is the most optimal for your business? Is it to hear about you online, go to a physical store and then ultimately find you again online when you have a promotion? Do they search for you on Google, fill out an interactive form on your website and then add your product to a cart and finish the checkout process?

Most businesses have several “critical paths” that their customers follow and your overall strategy should be to 1) figure out that path and 2) learn to optimize the path from the edges of the flow instead of rebuilding it every couple of months and having to restart your Facebook experiments from scratch..

So where does Facebook Analytics fall into this learning process?

Facebook Analytics will help you understand how your customers are actually behaving and which behaviors are most beneficial to your business. As you gain a better understanding of what behaviors you want to replicate, you’ll be able to create user flows that promote behaviors that you want to see in your customers and on the flip side, create flows that discourages behaviors that you want your potential customers to avoid.

Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics are not the same. Google Analytics is a comprehensive tool that enables you to look at more data than Facebook Analytics and allows you to do deeper dives into specific pages. On the other hand, Facebook Analytics is tied to a user, not a cookie and thus is best at showing you interactions among events so you can see opportunities to better cater your website/product offering that you maybe didn’t know were happening to specific individuals.

Event groups within Facebook Analytics allows you to look at omnichannel interactions. Many will argue that Google Analytics already provides this information but Facebook Analytics allows you to dive a bit deeper because it allows you to see post interactions in addition to page and website behaviors. You also can track offline data like in-store purchases and link them to your Facebook campaigns to see how your Facebook ads influenced those purchasing decisions.

There are three major reports that you can pull from Facebook Analytics: Funnels, Revenue and Customer Lifetime Value reports.

Funnels:

One of the best parts of the Facebook Analytics funnel reports is that they are able to tell you what actions individuals took on your Facebook page/ad prior to them converting into a customer. You can figure out of the individuals who “liked” this post, how many of them when to the website? Of those individuals how many of them ultimately ultimately lead to a sale? Understanding where along the funnels your customers are dropping out is one of the most invaluable pieces of information that Facebook funnels can provide.

Revenue:

Think of Revenue as a dashboard for purchase-related information. Let’s say you want to find out how many purchases were made through your app in a given time period. You could find this information in Revenue and examine it more closely by applying filters then create a funnel out of those insights as mentioned above.

Customer Lifetime Value:

Conventional reports in Business Manager merely look at the cost per conversion and revenue for each individual purchase. By looking at CLV, instead, we can see how much a customer is worth to us over the course of several months. You can break it down into a few factors:

• How often a customer makes a purchase within a typical purchase cycle
• How much a customer spends each time they make a purchase
• How much you project a customer will spend over the duration of your relationship with them
• The potential length of a customer’s relationship with you

As Facebook has stated “You shouldn’t use your prediction for any one of these factors alone as a representation of a given customer’s lifetime value. You should combine each relevant estimation into a formula appropriate for your business goals and use the result it produces.”

Facebook Analytics is just such an awesome tool to help individuals and companies understand how their Facebook efforts are working and where along the way they are dropping out.

Bonus freebie:

A lot of individuals ask us in addition to the reports above, what are some other Facebook specific metrics that we like to track. I have listed some of the most insightful metrics that provide the most amount of insights.

MAU (Monthly Active Users)
(# of Monthly Active Users/# of People Reached)

Audience Growth Rate
(# of new Facebook Fans/# of total fans on Facebook)

Engagement Rate
(# of engagements/# of posts)

Organic vs. Paid Traffic Rate

Average Revenue Per MAU
(MRR/Total Number of Customers)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
(Total Cost of Sales & Marketing/# of Sales)

Need a hand in understanding the constantly changing Facebook landscape? Contact us or call us and let our team of Facebook experts talk to you about your current Facebook marketing needs.