The Complete Instagram Set Up Guide

It may be approaching 11 years old, but it is still one of the best social media platforms to grow your awareness and business in 2022. We will show you how to set up your businesses or brands on Instagram to make it work for you!

Step 1: Create your Instagram account.

We recommend using your business email for your login, and a username that is identical to your business's name, like @cocacola or something very similar. For example, we use the username @jmediamarketingco for our handle.

Step 2: Optimize your account for success

The first time someone lands on your account, it's their first impression of your business or brand. How do you want to position yourself? What value are you going to offer them? What opinions do you want them to have of your page? All of these questions can be answered by optimizing the following items on your profile:

Page name: Your page name is the bold text that is below your number of posts, followers, and following counts. The great thing about your Page Name is that it is searchable within Instagram, meaning if you are a fitness coach, you can create your page name to be "Jason | Fitness Coach." Or if you are a business, you can use something like "Morgan CPA | Nashville Accountants." Adding your niche or business specialty to the end of the page name will result in people finding your profile when people search up "fitness coach" or "accountant" or whatever your business may be.

Bio: Your bio is the most important variable of success when someone lands on your Instagram page. In your bio, explain how you can bring your customers value, not what you do. For example, if you are a dentist, a basic bio would state:

Nashville Dentist

Oral Care and Surgery

Dr. Dirugeris & Dr. D

An optimized bio would state

Providing the Nashville community with bright clean smiles for 30 years

Dr. Dirugeris & Dr. D

See how your smile can be improved by following us/receiving a free in-person consultation!

Provide value to what the end-user is wanting. Some people may want clean teeth, some may want a new smile, and some may not know what they want, but that's okay, that's where the free consultation comes in.

Website Link: Make sure you have a website link that either goes to your website, your landing page, your offer, or a tree of links/link in the bio where you can direct people to one central link, and then that link showcases more links after they leave your Instagram profile.

Reminder: links do not work in the captions of posts! They are not clickable! We are seeing that happen over and over again, and Instagram does not work like that.

Highlight Covers: Highlight covers gives you a chance to showcase what your business is about in a visual sense. Your highlight section is where your past stories live on your page. As you can see below, all of the tips, behind the scenes, testimonials, Podcasts, and more that we have posted on our stories will live in perpetuity on our Highlights.

Note: To add a story to a highlight, you have to manually do it during the 24 hours that a story is live, or do it in the Archive after the story is has expired.

We hope this has helped your journey of creating and optimizing your Instagram account for success!