hey my name is Mike and this video could very well be one of the most valuable things you could do for your business that is of course setting up an Instagram business page and it doesn't matter what kind of business you are there's really eight major benefits to setting up a business profile on Instagram the first one of course is having access to two billion monthly active users on Instagram if your business is not on Instagram you're definitely missing out on a lot of traffic people who want to find you or searching for you and just can't find you on Instagram the second thing of course is the brand and partnership opportunities both organic and paid imagine this somebody goes to an ice cream shop they love their ice cream they take a picture of it they want to tag the ice cream shop where they got it but if you don't have an Instagram business page they can't tag you and therefore they can't tell their friends where to go to get your ice cream and that's just the organic side of it there's also influencer Partnerships you can set up thirdly an Instagram business page allows you to advertise on Instagram to promote posts and just access a larger audience fourth you get analytics so you can actually see insights into who's viewing your profile what kind of demographics are where they are what posts are doing better than others the fifth benefit is the ability to message other businesses and receive messages from potential customers who maybe have questions about your business and just don't want to pick up the phone they want to instead message you on Instagram sixth this is one that I think a lot of people don't really talk about and this is that you can rank on Google with an Instagram business page if people are searching for your business and you just got started odds are the domain Authority of Instagram is probably significantly higher than that of your own website when you launch and that means if somebody searches for your name Instagram could be a quick way to rank in Google search in addition to that you can also connect to a Facebook business page and linking these accounts makes it easier to manage all of your content and everything else on one platform and last but not least Instagram shopping you can actually have shoppable posts on Instagram where people can tap on the post see the products that are in it and then within the Instagram app make the purchase kind of reducing the friction reducing the barrier for somebody to actually be a buyer so with that being said we have a lot to talk about in this video I'm going to start off with the absolute beginning of setting up an Instagram account if you already do have a personal account just stand by for a couple seconds we'll get there and then we'll convert our account into a business account so starting off on Instagram you can just download the Instagram app on any phone uh iPhone Android I'm using an iPhone right here the steps are going to be the same no matter what you use and of course you could also use a tablet or even a desktop and later in the video I'll show you the desktop interface anyway so on the app I'm going to tap on create a new account on the bottom here we're going to say create a new account we can either sign up with our phone number or you can sign up with an email I'm going to sign up with an email in this video so I'm going to type in my email then I can say next and that will send me a confirmation I have to enter the code right now then we can create a password you can choose if you want to save your login information I'll say save and then it's going to ask for your birthday now here you want to make sure you put in your actual birthday and not like the founding of your company or something just because there may be age restrictions if you say you were born like a year ago versus when you're actually born so I'm going to put in my actual birthday here and then it's going to ask for a name so for the purposes of this video maybe I am a studio like a videography Studio filming commercials or something like that so I'm going to I'm going to say Sandell Studio or Sandell Studios Sandell Studios we'll say next it's suggesting Studios Sandell as the username obviously pick a username that makes the most sense for your business the simpler the better you want this to be something people can share and easily just remember so they can find you later then we have to agree to the terms and policies and now we can add a profile picture if you have a logo on your phone already when you say add picture you could just choose from your camera roll uh otherwise I'm just going to take a photo right now it's very easy to change this later don't worry just take any photo you want so I'm going to use this photo we can tap on edit and kind of resize it and reposition everything so that it is nice and centered we'll say okay and you can choose if you want to also share this as your first post if it's your logo maybe you could do that for me I'm not going to do that and I'll say done and that will bring us into Instagram we're pretty much ready to go now and this is going to start off as a personal profile but we're going to convert this to a business profile it's very easy to do so now uh I'm just going to skip these next couple things we don't need Facebook suggestions we don't need our friends from Facebook uh we don't need to remember the login information we already have that written down and we don't need to follow five people that's just a distraction for for the business that'll bring us into the Instagram interface here now from here you'll see we have five tabs across the bottom the first one is going to be your Home tab that's where you can see a lot of posts on here different reels just a general feed of what's going on for the people you follow up in the top we have stories I'll talk about those a little bit later but one little kind of trick I want to point out is if you start following more people and you realize there's a lot of just random browse suggested content down here and you don't want that if you tap on the Instagram logo on the top you'll see we can select either following or favorite so if you say following that is going to be a chronological order of everyone that you are actually following no suggested stuff no algorithm mixing things up this is actually just what you follow in the order it was posted now I don't follow anyone right now so nothing is going to show up there the second tab on the bottom is your search and your general browse this is just a huge distraction here but if you need to search for any other accounts that's where you can do that the middle one is the option to post so if I tap on that so there's really four different ways you can share content one is a post this could be either a photo or you know a whole bunch of photos if you want to have a a slideshow you can do that second one is story this is really going to be more for your immediate audience people who are following you and and want to see what you're up to every day maybe if you're closed for you know a holiday or something youd put that on your story as a 24-hour thing that's going to disappear the next day reals are going to be great for discoverability they're a full you know full vertical video usually about 60 to 90 seconds and then of course we have live as the fourth option there then over to the right uh the fourth tab is going to be your reels that again just kind of a distraction I recommend don't look at that one too much and then lastly you have your profile on the right so from here we need to change a little bit about our profile this is currently first of all just a personal profile so you can see our personal profile doesn't really show a lot of stuff it doesn't have any kind of links on here it doesn't have buttons for people to contact us so let's actually check out so let's convert this over right now if I tap on the three bars on the top right the hamburger icon if you want to call it that we can scroll down here first of all you want to make sure that account privacy is set to public so do not have this enabled if it's a private account this will not work this is incredibly important you have to make sure you are a public account before you convert to a business profile so as we scroll down then you should see somewhere that says uh change account type account type and tools here we go soort four professionals account type and tools tap on that and we are going to switch to a professional account if we swipe through here you'll see just like I told you before you can get analytics and insights about your posts you can reach more people by boosting posts with ads you can get new contact options so a little button for people to call you or email you and of course other things that I mentioned before so if I say continue we can choose our category so I am a studio is what I said so I'm going to say studio studio and uh movie television Studio that works fine you can choose if you want to display this on your profile profile I will display this so people know what sandal Studios is I'll say done and then it's going to ask us if we are a business or if we are a Creator so just give it a second for that to load and there we go so business or Creator now there are going to be some subtle differences here in what you're able to do and how your interface is really set up but it's really generally optimized I would say if you are genuinely a business you have either a physical shop or an online store or otherwise you are just a business business works really well and I find that the tool that are separated for business or Creator make perfect sense you are a Creator generally if you are a public figure if you're trying to be an influencer maybe you are like a politician you're running for office any kind of public figure like that you would want to be a Creator generally creators are going to be more of individuals whereas businesses are exactly what you think they would be I'm going to say next and leave this as a business right now and now we can populate some of our contact information so the business address for one I'm going to enter that right now so I can enter the location say done that'll bring us back now we can enter our business phone number we can have Instagram audio calling enabled or disabled so if anybody for whatever reason doesn't have the ability to call us from their normal phone number they can call us on Instagram again kind of reducing that barrier of people to contact you so that they can use your business or hire you or whatever you're doing buy stuff from you and then we have a WhatsApp business number as well if you want to do that again that's more of an international business type thing here in the US I wouldn't say that's particularly common but you could enable that if you wanted to now we can say next and by the way anything here if we wanted to change that in the future we can easily do that so here it wants to connect a Facebook business page I have an entire separate video on how to make a Facebook business page if you already watched that say log to Facebook right here and you can connect it if you haven't watched that skip it for now and then in that video I'll show you how to do that so don't worry about it right now they're very easy to connect later I'm going to say skip because I don't want to connect it right now now here it says seven steps don't worry about these seven steps there's really only one that we need to do and that is the first one complete your profile we don't want an avatar let's say not now skip the little Avatar thing and then we can choose our name we already did that username we already did that the profile picture looks good uh bio if you want to add a bio in here we can add a little paragraph So I have a little bio right there Then below we can add our links so I'm going to add a link to an external page I'm going to say this is just our website so I'm going to put our website in right here and the title of this I could just say book book now we'll say book now and I'll say done we can add more links if we wanted to I'm just going to leave it at that one right now and then down here we can have banners so this is usually like if you're dropping a new a new line of of like your fall collection or something like that you would add a banner for that so that's kind of all I want to do right here I'm going to say done and now we can close out of this little thing right here we don't need the rest a lot of it is really just for Instagram kind of pushing you to be an Instagram user not so much related to businesses so get inspired they want you to follow people grow your audience they want you to invite your friends I wouldn't worry about that uh get meta verified they want you to spend a couple dollars a month to get a little check mark next to your name uh again not something that I think is really necessary you could do it if you wanted to but I'm going to skip all of this stuff I'm going to close out of this and that'll bring us back to our page now talking about what we're able to do here I think the easiest way to illustrate this is to actually look at some other Pages which are already set up so I'm going to look at the manun Brewing Company it's a Philadelphia Brewery and they are definitely a business page as you can see right here you have the option to follow to message or to contact a third button is something that you won't see on a personal account so if I tap on contact they have their phone number and they have their email two ways you can contact them I could tap on either one of those and immediately be linked over to email or to my phone so I can contact them very easily that's one thing you're able to do the other thing you can do with the professional account is actually tag products in your post so you can see right here an example if you just tap on this you're able to actually see the product then you can make it shoppable as well so somebody can go to your post can tap on it can find out what products are pictured and then can make the purchase all within the app it's a really seamless uh really honestly integration of the products that you can have on there all right so now we have a professional Instagram account but we're not done yet there's some settings we need to modify and I just want to point this out in the future if you ever wanted to go back to what we just did just tap on edit profile and all of that stuff is going to be right here so now let's talk about those extra settings if we tap on the three bars on the top right again the little hamburger icon as some people call it but that'll bring us to a pretty long menu here of what we want to get into what I want to do is go down to business tools and controls you'll see here we have again another list of things but within here these are ones that really matter a lot to us when we're getting started so add payments branded content those are things that you will probably need to establish a presence before they're going to appear here so if I tap on branded content it says right now we're ineligible we just made the account like a couple minutes ago we have one post I wouldn't expect to be eligible until have a little bit more content out there and we kind of show to Instagram we're not a bot we're not a scam we're not trying to fraudulent uh do anything fraudulent here but what we can do right now is set up saved replies this is really cool if you get a lot of the same questions and you have frequent replies uh we can set up new saved replies so if I just tap on plus we can get a new saved reply it'll just make a little shortcut it'll turn into a full message it kind of saves us time if we're doing a lot of responding um on our Instagram here then below that another really cool thing you can do is FAQs so if you have frequently asked questions like the example they give what are your hours you can set that up right now so let's do that what are your hours we are open 7 a.m.
To 800 p.m. I'll say save now we have one of our four questions populated we can do three more after this and essentially these frequently asked questions are going to show up in the chat section of Instagram so it should be cutting down uh the workload you have to go in and reply to like when your hours are so when people go to message you they'll see this they can answer the questions without having to actually contact you additionally minimum age right here if you are selling uh like alcohol or something that is restricted for miners you could set your minimum age right here and change that very easily and if you want to accept appointment requests you can tap on appointment request down there and have that set up um again you probably will want to be setting up a Facebook business page before you start using that a lot more but other things within our insights and tools so going back to our settings and activity right here we can go to to insights and this will show us a lot now we don't have insights right here I'm going to switch over to my other Instagram account right now just to show you what it'll look like so from my other account if I tap on insights that'll show us a lot of charts you can see the overview the total views you had in the past week the interactions total followers and you can see individual content like how everything performed and you can you can check that out for the last seven days or any longer amount of time as well if we tap on see all you can see all the content I shared recently uh in the last days or again maybe in the last 3 months and if I want to dig deeper into something that maybe performed a little better than the rest so let's go down and see if I have any content this one right here for example seems to have performed very well you can see 18,000 likes uh 38,000 shares and a little over 2 million views so we can scroll down it tells us a lot more about uh things like demographics so it'll tell us some information about how long people watch this it's a 40-second video uh you can see how many different accounts were reached so a lot of people rewatch the same thing the average watch time is 22 seconds out of a a 40c video it's not great but it's not terrible and if we go back to insights we can tap into views interactions or total followers so if I tap on total followers it'll tell us a little bit more about what cities they're from what countries they're from the age range the gender split uh how you know when they're most active for example so you can figure out when the best time to post is and other things like that so that's all in insights right there so I would say our Instagram is pretty well set up right now I want to show you a really great tool in a second but first just kind of touching on the different types of posts you can make so if we tap on the plus remember I said there were four different posts you can make so you can do a traditional post which is generally going to be more of a photo or a gallery so you can have like 10 photos and people can swipe through that is pretty useful easy to tag products and easy for people to kind of interact with in that sense but to be more discoverable I would highly recommend experimenting a little bit more with reals so reals from my experience are going to be exposed to a lot of non-followers followers so it's going to be great for new exposure you don't have really any control over where the followers are going to be if you make local specific things like you talk about uh the best barbers in Philadelphia and and you're one of them then yeah it's more likely to get served to people who are in Philadelphia but you don't know for sure if they're going to be even in the United States at all they could be over in India they could be anywhere in the world that uses Instagram but it's still a really powerful tool to gain a lot of exposure the third thing is going to be story this is going to be best for inter interacting with anybody who already follows you so if I just go back to search for example you can see a lot of these accounts have that like orangish red ring circling around their account those are going to be stories so if I just tap on the story is going to be essentially just for 24 hours showing you maybe the latest deals or anything that they want to interact with people who are following them and of course you have Instagram live very few people really use Instagram live so I don't really have a whole lot to say about that I don't have a lot of experience with that either all right now getting over to my laptop I want to show you some cool tools we have available here one is the ability to schedule posts and create posts over on your desktop or your laptop so all you have to do is go to instagram.com log in with your credentials that we just created and that'll bring you to a page that looks something like this now on the left side you'll see create and from here unfortunately we cannot upload things like reals or stories but we can upload posts so if you have photos or Graphics or infographics or whatever and you want to share them you can do that right here by selecting from your computer so let me just do that right now so I don't know maybe this photo right here just for example I'm going to say next we can go through our filters and adjustments I can say next again we can add you know anything we want right here and then we could say share and we can publish from here so that's pretty great but if we click on advanced settings you can do this on phone by the way on your phone as well and then we can just click on share and that's how you'll be publishing from your desktop so two other great tools that I want to share with you one is actually canva this is going to be great for any kind of static post so if you just go to canva.com or we have an affiliate Link in the description below if you want to go through that but honestly just just you can just go to canva.com that's fine as well and you can create a lot of posts for free or you can upgrade and there's some other benefits with that but but just for free here if we click on social media we can create all kinds of different little Instagram posts they have templates that are pre-made so why we can check out maybe like uh really any one of these add our own photos and really customize it however we want and then so let's go with this one right here let's go with this one we can customize this template and it's a very easy drag and drop editor where everything in the middle is part of your design a bunch of little elements right there you can just double click into any one of them and change the text to whatever you want so Sandell studio and we can change that to a smaller text make it smaller so it fits in two lines and you can move things around anywhere you want on the left side we can go to elements and add all types of things in here so we can add shapes in there we can add graphics in there uh we can generate our own Graphics as well or we can add text and there's a lot of different formats for text we can add and just click can drag them over to here and when you're done on the top right you just click on share then you click on download and you'll have this image downloaded and you can upload that to Instagram so canva is a really fantastic free tool I have a full tutorial goes you know really in detail on how to use canva but another great tool if you want to do anything with with reels with short videos but you don't have a lot of experience with editing the next one is called cap cut so if you go to cap cut.com you can download this it's a very easy editor you can also get it as an app on your phone and this allows you to take videos and very easily cut them up make them into a nice little reel you can then share that it also does autoc captioning so it really does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and makes a lot of videos like you can make all these really quite easily using cap cut so now one more thing I want to show you on Instagram if you ever want to run an ad the simplest way to do that is to go to a post that you already made tap on Boost post and then you'll be able to set up your Facebook ad account for Instagram ads right here and just put some money behind it and boost it and get some more exposure for that post of course there are many other ways to run ads within the meta ads platform but the easiest like I said is just boosting a post you already had a good way to get started if you don't want to go through to all the hassle of really setting up the ads account and doing it on a laptop so that is my tutorial on how to set up an Instagram business page I hope you found this video helpful if you did please consider subscribing and the next video I highly recommend you watch is over here it's going to be our Facebook business page tutorial depending on when you watch this I update this every single year so if it is 2025 when you're watching this check out that one and that is going to be a huge next step for setting up your business page and connecting your Instagram to Facebook