The mistakes to avoid on your Instagram bio are being too personal, vague or cryptic.
If you are using Instagram for business, your bio should reflect
- who you are
- what you do
- how that helps and most importantly …
- how to buy from you.
5 Instagram Bio tips
1. User Name
Make this something that is easy to spell, easy to remember and reflects your brand. It could be your own name. It may be a product name. However, shortening a long business name often leads to awkward, hard to read handles.
To see what is available across web domains and social accounts take a look at https://namechk.com/
Account Name and Personal Name
2. Your Name
If your user name is your company, you should use this area for your personal name. Viewers connect better with the face that represents the brand than a logo. The example I use in this tutorial is if the account name is Popdance you should add Sue Wybrow in the name field.
However, if your user name is already your personal name you can update this field to reflect your title to reiterate to followers what you do. For example, my user name is LisaNichols_UK but my name is Social Media Coach.
3. Bio
There are only 150 characters in this space. Clearly describe what you do, how that helps and how to work with you. (Leave your love of sunsets, kids and pets to your personal profile).
4. Website
This is the only space for a clickable link on your profile. Use it to direct viewers to a specific page where followers can take an action (Sign Up, Check Out, Donate) or could be a third-party landing page for a promotion (like LeadPages for example). It is too vague to just send visitors to your home page.
If you have more than one place you would like to send people, create an account with https://linktr.ee/ and share that link instead.
TIP: Keep the options to a minimum. When visitors are overwhelmed with too many choices, they click away. Make sure you keep the links current.
5. Contact Details
Whilst we are all more mindful of sharing our personal information on social media, we need to be easily contactable for our business. Even if you use a PO Box as your physical location and a generic contact@email.com address, make sure you can be quickly reached by those who want to work with you.
If you want to understand how this would work for your business specifically, you can choose how to work with me here: