How is Instagram's Business Profile different from a Personal Profile?

How is Instagram's Business Profile different from a Personal Profile?

New to Instagram's Business Profile? Read on to know the difference and follow what best suits you.

Personal Profile

  1. You get to keep your profile private.
  2. The performance of your profile and posts depends completely on organic reach.
  3. You won't run into the risk being labelled as sponsored.
  4. Most importantly, you will need to use a workaround to publish posts from Zoho Social. Instagram does not provide necessary APIs for third-party apps.
  5. You can publish or schedule multiple images through the mobile notifications.
Planning to continue with Personal Profile? Read our guide to publish posts for Personal Profiles.

Business Profile

  1. Your profile gets more visibility since it is mandatory to keep Business Profiles public.
  2. You will have to necessarily connect your Business Profile to a Facebook Page once you make the switch.
  3. You get a few additional insights on the performance of your posts. You can run ads through a Business Profile and benefit from paid reach.
  4. Most importantly, you can directly publish posts from Zoho Social to Instagram. Instagram supports direct publishing from third-party apps only for Business Profiles.
  5. You can directly publish or schedule a post with only one image.
Planning to switch to a Business Profile? Learn about Instagram's Business Tools. Also, read our guide to set up direct publishing.
 
Instagram's Business Profile provides your brand with a lot more additional features than a personal profile would. For instance, you can get detailed analytics about your followers and your posts, promote your posts as ads, add links to your stories, and make it easier for your followers to contact you. Of course, it also helps that you will be able to directly publish to your Instagram profile through third-party platforms (like us) once you've made the switch. However, there are also certain things that you lose out on when you convert your profile to a Business Profile.

Firstly, Business Profiles on Instagram cannot be set to Private. That is a feature that is exclusive to Personal Profiles, so if social media privacy is really important to you, you may want to stick to a Personal Profile. Secondly, a Personal Profile on Instagram is very simple and easy to use. There are no complicated charts or columns, and no pop-ups that ask you to promote your posts. If you're not going to use many of the features of the Instagram Business Profile, then you might as well stick to the personal profile.

Why should you make the switch to a Business Profile?


As a brand, you're probably aware of what fuels business on social media: reach, engagement and conversions. While your personal profile on Instagram could be good enough to run a business with, Instagram Business profiles are tailored to give your brand the push it may need from time to time. 
This includes giving you key metrics such as: knowing your audience (follower demography), when to reach them (best time to post) and how to reach them (medium with maximum engagement). While a business profile may not automatically guarantee increased engagement (likes, re-grams and comments), its features can help you reach a wider audience. 

1) Key stats:

With an Instagram Business profile, you can track components that can help streamline your marketing and bring in revenue. From understanding your top-performing posts, to knowing if your audience likes pineapple on their pizza, the app's in-built analytics tool 'Instagram Insights' has you covered. You need this to know where your clicks, likes, re-grams and conversations are coming from. With this, your business can run informed polls, track best time-slots to post content and a bunch of other follower/performance details which will help carry your marketing efforts. 

2) Contact made easy:

There's only so much reaching out you can do with a 'Link in bio' filler on every post. Instagram for Business lets your brand reach your audience a little more directly. You can affix a Call, Email or Direction button right above your feed, so that your audience can reach you better. 

3) Adding Links to your Story:

If your business page has over 10,000 followers, you unlock the feature to add easy 'swipe up' links in your Instagram stories. This makes everything from payment gateways, to product pages only an up-swipe away. 

4) Advertising your brand: Running ads and campaigns/sponsored posts:

This is perhaps the key differentiator of business and personal profiles. Once you've switched to a business profile, you can run sponsored ads on Instagram. You can create 4 types of ad campaigns using your Instagram business account - image, video, story & carousel major with your key take away being that these are targeted campaigns. With Business profiles you can even set campaign priority to specific needs like - creating traffic to page or generate engagement (likes, re-grams etc)  etc.

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