What Are Instagram Business Tools and Why You Need Them Right Now

Back in the summer of 2016 Instagram announced that it was taking the step of rolling out some new Instagram Business Tools in the US, Australia and New Zealand, with further countries to follow. The great news for UK businesses is that they are now here for us to take advantage of, so read on to find out what they are and why you need to start using them.

How can they help me?

There are several great reasons why you should consider switching to a business account, including:

• Gives customers more options to contact you, including a phone number, email address and physical address
• Provides simple analytics that help show you how your posts are performing. This allows you to see what’s working and react by adjusting the content of your posts
• Gives you additional insights on your followers, which will help adjust your content and posting times
• Gauge whether or not people are interested in finding out more on your website
• Allows you to quickly and easily promote your posts to reach a bigger audience and in turn drive more engagement

What are Instagram Business Tools?

The Business Tools suite is made up of the following:

• Business profiles
• Insights
• Promotion

Business profiles

These are a free feature and are designed for people who want their account to be recognised as a ‘business’.

Converting your personal account to a business one gives you the opportunity to add additional contact details to your profile for customers to use. You need to have a minimum of one of the following listed: telephone, email address or physical address.

Insights

Up to now, marketers needed to use a third party tool (often paid) in order to try and get an understanding of how their account and posts was performing. Now you can get this information straight from the app using the new Insights section.

The metrics are not extensive, but are definitely good enough to give you a clear idea of performance.

There are two ways to view the metrics – on each post itself and on the overall account dashboard.

• Impressions – how many times each post was seen
• Reach – how many unique accounts saw the post
• Engagement – how many unique accounts liked or commented on the post

   

On the account dashboard you can view Impressions and Reach, as well as:

• Website clicks – the number of accounts that have clicked on your website link in your business profile (past 7 days)
• Followers – specifically gender, age range and location (cities and countries), plus the average times your followers are on Instagram on a typical day
• Profile views – number of times your business profile was viewed (past 7 days)

  

Promotion

Naturally Instagram (and parent company Facebook) want more businesses to use its advertising services, so this feature is an obvious one; however doing so is going to give you a bigger reach.

The Business Tools dashboard app now gives you the opportunity to quickly promote your posts with the following steps:

1) Choose a call to action button

2) Enter the link for your landing page

3) Set your budget, audience and duration

4) Review your ad, add a payment method and submit it for review

How to get Business Tools

You will need to use your mobile app (either iOS or Android) to access and use Business Tools – they are not available on the desktop version.

The process is very quick and easy, as this video from Instagram demonstrates:

Creating a Business Account on Instagram from Instagram for Business on Vimeo.

For more information about making Instagram part of your social media strategy, please contact us via this form or call 0203 5533 282