How to Create Perfect Instagram Bio: Tips & Ideas
You may already have a strategy in place to maximize your presence and follower count on Instagram. But have you considered how vital your Instagram bio is?
In this article, we’ll go over what makes up an Instagram bio and outline some tips and tricks for you to optymise the performance of this critical real estate on your Instagram page.
Perfecting your Instagram bio is not tricky, and it is an essential part of any winning Instagram strategy.
Why great Instagram bio is so important?
Your Instagram bio is the first impression your brand will make on your page visitors.
This bio section gives you up to 150 characters to show your visitors what your about, what kind of content you offer, and why they should care.
It’s worth putting some thought into what kind of impression you want to make here.
It also provides you with an opportunity to link back to your website or another page on the internet, which could help to convert your Instagram page visitors into website visitors, or visitors on another service you’d like to promote.
What makes up a great Instagram bio
Profile Photo
The first part of your Instagram bio is the profile photo.
This will be a small image on the far left of your bio. You’ll want to make sure that this image is representative of your brand.
Whether that be a picture of you, your logo, or your most popular product, you’ll want to make sure whatever image you choose helps your page to stand out. You’ll also want to be sure that this image looks as good at smaller sizes.
Use this small image to set the tone for your brand.
This photo will be the first representation of your brand that visitors to your brand page see. If you’re a business, a popular choice is to include your logo. If you’re an influencer or another type of small business you may have some more room to be creative here.
Username
Your username also referred to as your Instagram handle, can be seen at the top of your profile and is preceded by an @ symbol.
Ideally, you should try to use your company’s name as the account’s username, but this may not always be possible.
If you have a business name that is somewhat shorter or uses common words or phrases, you may need to get creative with this part. Try adding ‘store’ to the end of the username for example.
This username will be your identity on Instagram, and it will be part of your profile URL, so you will need to choose carefully. If you don’t pick something relevant to your business, for example, you may scare off potential visitors thinking this may be a fake page.
Make sure your username is consistent with usernames on other social media websites.
This will help add some legitimacy to your brand and will make it easy for users to find you based on searching for or looking for just one handle.
Name
Your Instagram name will appear in a more prominent spot. It is bolded on your profile page. If you have been able to secure your business’s name for your username, you may be able to get a bit more creative using your Instagram name.
For example, if you own a bakery called Cakes and Friends In Vermont, you could change your name to, The Best Cakes in Vermont.
This name field is included in Instagram searches.
You will want to be strategic and try to add more than just your brand name in your name (unless your name is a ubiquitous term that already dominates search).
However, you’ll want to avoid including too many keywords in your bio. This is a great way to appear as spamming and scare away potential followers.
Website
This is one spot on Instagram where you can post a clickable link. Use it wisely.
You can edit this link as much as you’d like. This allows you to link to more timely content like a new product, a new video, landing pages, or relevant content on your website.
If you need to drive traffic to a specific campaign, this would be a great place to try and accomplish that.
Using a URL shortener with a tracking code is an excellent way to track how well these timely kinds of promotions do by giving you access to detailed statistics of how much traffic those links drove to your site.
Because this is the only spot on Instagram that lets you place a clickable link, you’ll want to be careful and creative with how you maximize the value of this limited space.
Bio
Instagram gives you 150 characters to explain to your visitors who you are, what you do, your unique values, and to ensure them that they’ve come to the right place.
This is the section that will need the most tweaking as it offers the most real estate for text in the profile section.
Instagram bio is the perfect spot to answer the question that every visitor has on their mind when they visit your page. What is your story?
Location
If you have an Instagram business account, they have added a section for adding location address and email address. This is the perfect way for you to tell visitors where you are and how they can reach you.
Especially if you are a local business like a restaurant, this location section is a great reason to make the switch to an Instagram business account and learn more about promoting your restaurant on Instagram.
Tips for improving your Instagram bio
Here are all the tips and ideas how you can turn your Instagram bio into a real winner.
Add a Tagline
You should use a unique slogan in your bio. Tell people what your company or brand does in an unusual or thought-provoking way using just a sentence or two. What makes you different from your competitors?
If you don’t think a tagline would be right for your brand, you should think about adding your mission statement or core values. Be creative and show your page visitors what you’re about.
Add emojis
Adding emojis lets you bring out some more personality than just text alone. They’ll help make your Instagram bio appear more exciting and can be an excellent replacement for certain words.
Even if you feel that emoji are a bit too cute for your brand, you might want to consider using them. You don’t have to overuse them, but adding just one or two to your page can help to develop your brand personality and add some much-needed flair to your bio.
Emojis also offer a great way to space out text or separate text into sections beyond just using a period, dash, or pipe.
This can be the perfect way for you to think about adding emojis to your page if you don’t already use them. Need to separate some text? What emoji could you use there in place of another form of punctuation?
Include Keywords in Your Bio
Using keywords in your Instagram bio won’t improve your discoverability on Instagram. The part of the bio included in search is the ‘Name’ section mentioned above. But, adding keywords to your bio may give some much-needed focus to your brand, and help convert visitors into followers who want to engage with your content.
When thinking of keywords to add to your bio, think about your brand, and the type of content your ideal followers would want to see. For example, if you’re a vegan brand, you might want to include the keyword ‘Vegan’ in your bio.
Help define your page with keywords in your bio, and let your potential audience know exactly what you’re about by taking a quick glance at your bio.
Less is More
Even though we want to help define our brand to our followers using just the Instagram bio, we want to avoid adding too much. Having too much information in the bio could hide what your brand is all about, or turn visitors away by offering them too much information to take in all at once.
Keep in mind that visitors on Instagram are going to be primarily interested in visual content, and they won’t be all too excited to be confronted with a novel on your Instagram bio page.
Your bio should be as simple as you can make it. Provide just the essential information about the brand. Like a short elevator pitch. If a visitor wants to learn more about your business, they can dive into your content, follow the link to your page (which should be in your bio), or do a Google search about your brand to discover more about who you are as a business.
Keep your bio short, small, and succinct. If you clutter it up, you could hurt your brand, not help it.
Include a Branded Hashtag
If your account uses user-generated content by leveraging the power of branded hashtags, you should include that hashtag in your bio.
This will give users the opportunity to see the material that has been created about your brand outside of the context of your page. This is a fantastic way to drive engagement with your posts.
Let your visitors discover the content that your loyal audience is helping to create. And if you have not thought about using a branded hashtag yet, this would also be the time to think about that.
Include a Call to Action
What do you want people to do after seeing your Instagram profile?
Your call to action in your Instagram bio should compel you Instagram page visitors you send you an email, visit your website, or even stop in and visit your brick and mortar store.
Your bio is not complete without a call to action, and this is probably, aside from the link you can include on your page, one of the most critical parts of your profile.
This call to action can help drive more engagement on your posts as well.
Be clear in presenting your page visitors with a next step, and be sure to align this call to action with the link in your Instagram bio. If your call to action says to visit your website, but you are linking to your Amazon store page, this would be a bad experience for your users.
Be sure to update your call to action and the link on your page at the same time, so they match up and drive your users to the action you intend.
Link to Your Other Social Media Profiles
Tell your visitors how to find you on other platforms. This is a great way to not only drive more engagement to your brand on different profiles but also to show users other types of content they might want to see.
Snapchat and Twitter content will be slightly different from Instagram content, and this may be content that your page visitors might want to see. Don’t miss out on the chance to send your unique profile visitors to your other pages.
Conclusion
Your Instagram bio is much more than just a compelling profile photo. The name, username, links, and text you choose to include on your page could go a long ways towards helping to convert curious users into followers, and even customers for your business.
Developing a winning profile strategy should be a vital part of any plan to maximize followers on Instagram. Without improving the critical elements of your profile to maximize value for your visitors, you might be turning them away.
If you feel like your brand is getting ignored on Instagram, you might want to take a second look at leaving a good impression with your profile.
Karen is a senior technical writer and copywriter here at GrowFollowing. Her area of expertize are social media apps and new media.