Instagram Bios

Instagram is important for businesses — that’s a fact. But there are differences between Instagram accounts that excel and Instagram accounts that stagnate. One of the reasons? The famed Instagram bio.

What is the IG Bio?

If you look at the picture above, those 4 lines of text under the profile’s name is what’s known as an Instagram bio. No doubt most of you have Instagram so I don’t need to introduce it further. However, what I will be discussing is why it’s so important for your business (even your personal brand, if that’s what you’re working on).

In this blog, I will be discussing:

• Why the IG bio is so important;
• A few tips on how to craft one for yourself.

Why?

In short, your bio is the only online ‘real estate’ your Instagram account has. It’s the only place where you can say something about you or your business. It’s also the only place where you can share clickable links on your Instagram account.

What this means is that your bio is generally what (potential) followers see first. Think of it as a supermarket putting discounted items at eye-level on the shelves. This is done so that customers see these first. The same principle applies to the bio — it’s the first thing people see so it needs to grab attention instantly.

There’s also a character limit in the bio — 150 to be exact. This makes the challenge even greater since you have to explain what your business/brand is and provide a link in very few characters. When it comes to Venuepark’s bio, it’s a work in progress. We update it semi-regularly, depending on how much traction we’re getting from a given iteration. The tips you’re about to read below are therefore based on what I’ve been doing for Venuepark.

How?

Below is a screenshot of what Venuepark’s bio currently looks like.

As you can see we’ve got one link, which takes you to The Collection, which is our content collection and sharing platform. Going from the top down, we have our business description, in which we succinctly explain exactly what it is we do. After that we have our hashtag engagement tool. If someone tags a picture with ‘#Venuepark’, we might feature them on our account. Further down is our location. We added this because it adds an element of humanization — if our location is known, we come across as people, not just a business. Finally, we have our email address, which is used for all inquiries and communications. For a while, we considered adding a Linktree link, which is a platform that allows you to add links under a unified single ling which you can add to your bio, but that’s still a work in progress for us.

The principles I employed for this bio are rather simple:

• Keep the text short and snappy.
• Show that you’re promoting engagement with other users and businesses.
• Add your location.
• Add a simple, catchy email address.
• Choose what link to post carefully since there’s space for only one.
• Use emoji that stand out and reflect what you/your business does.
• Ensure that the bio is vertically aligned on your phone (most people use Instagram on their phones). It’s impossible to align something both on phone and desktop.

Conclusion

All of the above is essentially how I approached Venuepark’s Instagram bio. As usual, my format is not a definitive guide but we’ve been quite successful with this bio so far. Writing bios is an iterative process so I might change it in a few months, but for now, the tips I’ve highlighted above should serve to help.