Best practice for Business social media accounts
Business accounts should be treated with the same care as any other public realm of your business. Personality is vital, playfulness is welcome and picking out flaws can be great for business! Remember though— there is always a line. Think of the account as a representation of your company’s professionalism and press Post cautiously.
Use the platform wisely to up engagement and awareness of your brand. Show each facet of your business! For example, we have our social media, media buying and production areas, so we show off elements of each. What can we do for those who follow us? A lot!
Here is our best practice top ten for business profiles on Instagram:
Post high quality images
There’s nothing worse than uploading a fuzzy or blurry image. It completely takes away from the creativity that was intended. Using a great camera helps, and these days, smartphones can often do the trick for posts on Stories. For feed posts, it’s best to either create great graphics or high-resolution images. See our blog post taking you through the basics of Photoshop for some handy tips to making your images stand out.
Create easy templates for resizing
We also went through this in more detail in our blog post about Photoshop. Feed posts and Stories posts are obviously different sizes, and you may find yourself sacrificing a great image in its entirety by having to crop it. Two ways to get around this: set the template frame when you capture the image or footage, or create templates on Photoshop or other similar software to stretch and resize.
Write a succinct bio line
Your bio is one of the most important parts of the account. Who are you? What do you do? Here is where you need to be as concise as possible— no blabbering allowed! (In fact, Instagram won’t let you.) Key words about your brand and services is all you need. You can input details about your company’s location so leave this out, unless you have the room to put it in. Be punchy— you want people to stop and scroll down further, not read a full mission statement and get bored.
Fill in all of your business’ contact details
When setting up your business account, fill in every single detail possible. If a prospective client can’t find you or call you, what’s the point? You are able to choose the industry or type of business you run; eg. Advertising Agency, Filmmaker, Writer. Try and select the closest one to you, though being broad is best if you are talented in multiple things! The buttons on your profile can also be personalised to your preferred contact methods or options. Don’t have a business phone number? Don’t have the Call button on the profile.
Ensure your spelling and grammar is 10/10
Isnt bad speling just the wurst? Instant turn-off. If you can’t spell, how can you seriously be trusted to communicate properly over email to clients or partners? This might sound a bit hyperbolic, but your professionalism takes a hit when there are spelling and grammar mistakes riddled throughout your websites and professional profiles. You really have no excuse now that apps such as Grammarly exist.
Stick to a consistent brand message or story
Think wisely about how you want to present your brand on social media. Play off the company’s colour scheme, industry and services to create a visual story. Some of the best Instagram accounts are by businesses that pull in followers because of the aesthetic of the profile, not necessarily the need of the brand’s services. Use graphics and framing to enhance the look, or get onto illustrator software to make it more intricate. For Hotglue’s social media revamp, we looked for inspiration via other agencies and accounts we love and pulled all of our favourite elements into ours.
Create interactive content
Stories come into play here. Make it fun! Use the stickers and functions available, like polls, questions or the scrollbar. Create Highlights categories (and the icons to match) that relate to what you’ll be posting about. Otherwise, are you good at coming up with funny or pun-ny captions? Make a statement with your profile and stick to it. You may earn followers for your captions alone, or they may get the best of both worlds with great imagery too.
Poach clients carefully…
Okay, maybe not “poach”, per se. But is it wrong to follow accounts of prospective clients or collaborators? No. The only thing to be careful of here is breaching loyalty with the brands that you have already built relationships with. Signed with a great winemaker? Maybe try a spirits brand or brewery next. Although, if you can tell that you’re following a personal account, going through a competitor’s followers list and getting some attention isn’t the worst idea…
Follow the business style guide
You may already have a style guide for internal communications, but what about social media? Pick out key colours or layouts to set up the grid. Do you want it to be half colour, half black and white? Or do you prefer the 9x9 approach? Marry in imagery by having each row a similar colour perhaps. See Tip #6 for this too, and think about your brand’s voice.
Sell your products using Shop
Head over to your Facebook page to set this up. Click on the Shop tab and gradually load in the products that you sell. Use high resolution images (see Tip #1) and be concise with the information detailed. Once in Instagram, you can go to the Tag People/Products icon to have a direct link to your Facebook Shop setup.
If you’re still struggling to figure out Instagram Business accounts, we give permission for you to have a look at ours for some inspiration, or give us a yell and we can give you a hand! 😉 (You follow us, don’t you?)