- [Instructor] When using Instagram for business purposes,
it's important to optimize your Instagram profile
so that people know who you are
and where they can find out more about your organization.
To do this,
make sure that you're on your own profile page on Instagram.
You can do that by tapping on the icon
at the very bottom right of the screen.
You can see we've already done that here.
From our profile page, we can tap on the Edit Profile button
to edit all of the information displayed to users
on our Instagram profile.
On this screen, we have a number of different fields
that we can fill out to give people more information
about who we are here on Instagram.
The first two fields are very similar.
The first one called Name is for the real name
of the person or organization using the account.
The second field is the account username.
So the first field is your more professional looking name
here on Instagram.
You can actually put spaces in that field
whereas in the other one you can't.
For the first one,
go ahead and put your actual organization name
or your brand name,
however you'd like to appear on Instagram.
Notice that we have Pixelford Photography.
That's going to be one of the example accounts
that we're using throughout this course.
In the second field, you can put a very similar name
but you can't put any spaces.
You may need to use an underscore
or just use your organization name without spaces.
Notice that for us again
we have Pixelford Photography in the first field
and just Pixelford in the second field.
Notice that they have a field for pronouns
if you'd like to enter any of those
and then it's really important to enter a website
in the fourth field on this page
because we need to give people a place to go
outside of Instagram
where they can find more about our brand.
So go ahead and enter your website in that field.
You can see that we have pixelford.com entered.
Now, we also have the opportunity to add a short bio
to our Instagram account.
So you can see we have New York area photography
specializing in capturing special moments and occasions
and notice that we have the word photography
with a hashtag in front of it.
It's not something that you have to do
and it doesn't really do anything
in terms of increasing the exposure
of your Instagram profile.
It just gives users a place
where they can tap on the photography hashtag
because it's something that we're interested in
and by doing this,
we're showing them that we're actively using Instagram,
that we're involved with hashtags
and this is one that's important to us.
So make sure to enter a bio
that's fitting for your organization.
I really want to stress that this description should be short
because people aren't going to read an entire history
or a huge mission statement here on Instagram.
They're here to look at photos.
Short, sweet and to the point is best.
We scroll down a little bit here,
you'll notice that we have some public business information.
So we have a Facebook page linked to our Instagram account
and then we also have the category
that our account is listed under.
We chose the category
when we converted our personal Instagram account
to a business account
but you can always come in here afterwards,
you can modify the category
or you could change the Facebook page
that's linked to your account.
In the Contact Options sections,
we have the option of providing an email address
and if we tap on it,
you'll see that we also could have provided a phone number
or an actual physical address
so that people can contact us outside of Instagram.
So if you're a brick and mortar business,
not a bad idea to enter your address here as well.
Let's go back for now.
Notice that we have a few other options here.
The Profile Display
is not really that important for us as a business
because we want to display everything.
We don't want to hide anything.
We do have this area that says Action Buttons
and if we tap on that,
if we were a business that we're doing online reservations
or people could order food from us
or book a type of appointment,
we could actually put a button on our Instagram profile
and then link it to our website
where they can actually make those reservations
so that we have an actionable item
right on our Instagram profile.
So if that is something that you're doing as a business,
I highly recommend using this Action Buttons feature
because that's a great way to convert Instagram viewers
into customers.
Let's go back for now.
There's one last thing I want to show you on this page
and that's at the very top.
You'll notice that we have the option
to change a profile photo.
So we already have ours in there but if I tap on it,
you'll notice that we could take a photo right now,
we could import it from Facebook
and if you have a logo that you'd like to use,
what I recommend doing
is just go ahead and email yourself that logo
and then download it on whatever device you're using.
Keep in mind that, notice that the Instagram profile photo
is in a circular orientation
so make sure that you're using a photo or a logo
that looks good in a circle.
You can see ours looks pretty good.
Even though it's a square, it works well in that circle
so just keep that in mind.
So when you're all set,
you can just tap on the Done button at the top right
and you'll notice that we're back to our Instagram profile
and if you've added any information
on your own Instagram profile,
you should now see it updated.
If you started with a brand new account
and you didn't have a description or a photo,
your Instagram account should really be looking
a lot more professional now.
Users will know who you are and what you do
when they access your Instagram profile page.