Should I have a business or a personal Instagram account?
This is a question we get asked all the time from up and coming food bloggers, and one that pops up in frequent discussions with more experienced Instagram Influencers. So we’ll spell out the key differences between a business and personal instagram below for you to help you make your decision.
Personal Instagram
Great for:
- Hobby bloggers (you don’t plan to work or collaborate with any brands), and would never use any of the extra features.
- People just starting out – you’ve probably got enough to learn before you start getting into all the insights of a business account.
- A PERSONAL account – the one where you put photos of your cat, or one you use as a “behind the scenes” account for your business.
- If you want to make your account private.
- Linking multiple facebook pages to your account.
There are rumours that personal accounts have better engagement than business accounts on instagram (i.e. more people see your photos), but given that the analytics for a personal account are limited, there’s little evidence for this. You also have no way to check the quality of your audience on a personal account – fine if you’re just posting photos for yourself, but pretty useless if you want to offer a real return on investment to brands.
Business Instagram
Great for
- Businesses, including small businesses or influencers who want to work with (collaborate with) brands.
- Detailed analytics about your audience – such as age, location and times they are online.
- Increased chances of collaborations with brands, as you can provide more info about your followers. Moving into 2019, brands are going to be increasingly interested in the quality rather than the quantity of your audience.
- Improving your content. You can see which posts are more popular; which ones may reach not many people, but actually get a lot of engagement; or those that reach thousands but get little response. This will help your page get better over time.
- Tailor your content to your audience. My audience don’t care about stories, they don’t care about videos. Probably not as unusual as you’d expect, according to this instagram trends survey by Preview. But it means I don’t waste hours of my time on them, for no return.
- Opportunity to promote your posts to reach a wider audience.
- Contact button on your page. Very useful in converting people, and way more professional than a DM.
- Links in instagram stories (if you have more than 10k followers), which allows you to link back to your website.
While there’s no right or wrong answer to this question and you need to do what feels right for you, for us an Instagram Business Profile was a clear winner. The insights and analytics just help us provide a much better experience for brands we work with and our followers!