Instagram Business Profiles, which were introduced in 2016, offer your business a number of different tools to assist you with growing and marketing your business.

Creating a business account or changing your personal Instagram account into a business account is free. However, if you choose to advertise your business on the Instagram platform, buying ad space, understandably, will cost you money.

You may worry that changing your Instagram account from a personal one to a business one will limit your organic reach. However, this does not appear to be the case with Instagram Business profiles. As long as you keep sharing content of a high quality, you will not reach fewer people than you would with a personal Instagram profile.

However, the two features to which you will lose access upon converting your personal profile to a business profile are the following:

1. Being able to link your Instagram profile to more than one Facebook profile (only one Facebook page may be connected to your Instagram business account—linking your business’ Facebook page to the Instagram business account will make it easier for you to use the various features available to businesses across the family of apps belonging to Facebook)
2. Being able to set your posts to “Private”

The loss of these two features are not exactly drawbacks, though, when it comes to business profiles, since the goal of a business account is generally marketing and raising awareness about your business, so you probably wouldn’t set your posts to be private anyway. This is probably the reason why Instagram removed those particular features for Business accounts.

Advantages of an Instagram Business Profile

Use Instagram Insights

Personal Instagram accounts provide little to no information or metrics regarding your followers and who sees your stories or views your posts. But with an Instagram Business profile, you get access to Instagram Insights, which allows you to learn more about the ones who follow you and those who interact with your business profile on Instagram.

Using Instagram Insights, you will be able to see the posts and the stories your audience is seeing the most and with which your audience is engaging the most. You will also be able to see the gender, location, and age range of your followers. Realtime metrics and insights regarding your account will also include paid activity. Accounts reached, impressions, impressions by day, and reach will reflect both organic and paid activity.

The Activity tab of your Insights page will enable you to track Reach, Impressions, and weekly Interactions. The Content tab allows you to see the performance of your stories, posts, and promotions. The Audience tab will offer you important insights on your audience, including the growth of your followers over time.

Add Links to Your Instagram Stories

With an Instagram Business profile, you will be able to add clickable links to your stories, provided that your business profile has at least 10,000 followers. This can be a powerful marketing feature, since 75% of users will take an action like visiting a website after viewing a post or story.

Advertise and Make Promoted Posts on Instagram

Operating a business profile will give you the option to buy sponsored or promoted posts in order to advertise on the Instagram platform.

You can pay for promotions directly from the Instagram app. You can also set details such as your daily promotion budget (how much you wish to spend on promotions), the duration (how long you want the promotion to be shown), and the audience you wish your promotion to reach.