Crush Your Social

Welcome back to the Crust Your Social podcast, where we make social media simple. I'm Toni, your host, and together we're going to crush it. Today the topic is the Instagram profile, how to get people to do something when they actually visit your profile. If you have an Instagram profile and it's not doing anything, we're going to figure out why and we're going to fix it. Go to your profile page on Instagram.

Let's go. There's several sections to the page. The first thing at the very, very top is the username or what we like to call the handle.

If you want to be cool, call it the handle. The handle is the name of your business, hopefully. If you go to my page, Crust Your Social, you'll notice that it is exactly that. Crust Your Social, there are no dots, there are no dashes, and there are no underscores. You want to make it super simple. The top is the name. The second part is the photo beneath the name. You can have your logo, but on social media, people like to see the person behind the brand, especially if you're not a big company. If you're Nike, you're going to have the swoosh, because you have a lot of people managing. If you are a brand new creator or a business owner that doesn't have a huge team, it would be great if you could have your picture. Next to the photo is something called posts, and that's how many posts you've made. Next to that is your followers, how many people are following you. Next to that are following. That's how many people you are following. Underneath that is what they call the headline section. It's also called the name section, which can be kind of confusing because you got the name at the top. But this section and the name at the top, the username, are the only two places where you can be found with SEO keywords on Instagram.

We'll talk about what that means in a few minutes, but I want to still cover all the parts. You've got the name section or the headline section, and then below that is your description of what your page is about. You can also add a call to action, which is also known as a CTA, if you have a place you want them to go off of the page. You can add a link or several links, and we can talk about that later. Below that is something called a highlight section, which I briefly touched on at the last podcast. If you don't have highlights, then it won't be there. A highlight is simply a story that you've saved into a permanent section. A story is normally only good for 24 hours, but you can save it into the highlight section and you can create headlines. Underneath that is, of course, the feed content from you.

Let's go back to the top. Let's go to your name. If you have a business name, use your business name, especially if you have a website. Use the same name that's on the website. Try not to use any dots, dashes, or underscores. It needs to be very simple for people to type in, or they will make mistakes and they won't be able to find you. Also, if your name happens to have a keyword in there, that's a bonus. Minus crush your social. People looking for social media help are going to be able to find me pretty easy because I have a keyword there. Going down to the headline section, there's a few things you can do. You'll want to have a first name there. You don't necessarily need your last name. You'll notice on my page that I do have my last name, but that's because my account is meta verified and it's required. All you need is a first name of whoever will be the face of your business. If it's you, it's your name. Then you'll want to have a line, a dividing line. From there, the rest of the section, you'll want to have words people would use to find what you do.

I'm a social media strategist and agency. My signature area says social media strategist. Of course, I'm a speaker, so I added that in. The headline section has a maximum of 40 characters that you can use. You want to be really strategic and focused with the keywords that you use. You'll want to have your first name. Hopefully, it's not super long like mine. Then you'll want to have a couple keywords that people will use if they're looking for your services. Below that is the bio section. That's the description section.

That has a maximum of 150 characters. Again, you have to be really brief. You can use chatgbt to help you figure it out. That section needs to describe what your page will be about. It can cover what your services are, but in a way that your content will also cover it. For instance, my page is about social media, specifically Instagram. I talk about all the areas of Instagram.

My bio is about how to save time on content, how to get engagement and build awareness online, Instagram specifically, and how to increase conversions, meaning how to make more people do stuff on your page. That's what I talk about in my content. That's what people pay me for.

You'll want to figure out what that sweet spot is that you can say, "I help people solve whatever problem." Or, if you have a big promise, you can say that. Even if you can talk about a couple bullet points of how you do it in a way that makes you different, and I know this sounds like a lot, it's really helpful. You want to stand out with your bio. You want people to hit your bio and go, "Oh, that looks really interesting. Oh, those tips are going to be helpful. I need to follow that person."

If you have a lead magnet, and the lead magnet is to help you grow your email list, and it's usually some kind of guide or book or checklist or something that you can offer your readers

in exchange for their email list, you can have a call to action, a CTA, that would be get my free guide here, and you can have a link to that guide where they would sign up, give you their email, and they would get that free guide, and they would be on your email list. Here's a little fun fact about me. I grew my email list fairly quickly in the last couple of years. I had a lead magnet in my second year, but I didn't do anything with my email list until just 2024.

I had like 850 people on this email list that I had collected over the course of a couple of years, and I never talked to them. Email has the highest conversion rate, so it's like 33% or something. For 2024, my goal was to actually talk to those people, but you don't have to worry about that. If you just want to start building the list like I did, people will be there. If you think about it later, you can send an email or not. It's up to you, but you'll want to have a call to action. You'll want them to do something. If you don't have a lead magnet, your call to action can be simply, "Follow me for tips on how to do the thing that you help them do." Okay, now we're going to go back up to the top part where your picture should be. You might have a logo there. As I said, it's better if you can have a photo there. A photo of you that's kind of close up. If you want to look at my photo, it's a good example. Shoulders up, looking at the camera, no sunglasses, no hats, and wearing your brand colors.

Or wearing neutrals with a brand color background. You want it to be recognizable. You want people to know, "Oh, that's that person. That's that brand." You'll want a picture in there. Moving from that, looking over at the next two sections, which are the posts, how many posts have you made? That doesn't change. It just changes as you add posts to the page. It's a way to check legitimacy, too. We'll talk about that on another podcast. The middle section is how many followers you have. There's a couple things you'll want to know about how many followers you have. If you have under 100 followers, you can't check your content insights, which is really just the data that helps you to know what kind of content is working. You have to get to 100 followers. The other section after that is following how many people you're following. A couple of things we need to talk about here. You want to make sure that you're not using a personal account for your business account. Your friends and family won't support your account, and it will mess up your algorithms. Make sure you have a business account or a creator account. It doesn't matter which. They just offer different kinds of tools, and you can switch back and forth at any time. Try one. If you don't like it, try it again. Check the differences. Business account in your industry. When you follow people, don't follow your personal friends. Don't follow your family. Don't follow your dog. Make sure that the people you're following are either influencers in your industry that have an engaged community that you can build a community from, or they are competitors. I know that sounds crazy. Why would I follow competitors?

Competitors on this platform will be your best friends. They will support your content because they can validate your knowledge. They know if you know what you're talking about.

They want to grow, too. You can collaborate because usually competitors have a different angle on what it is that they do that's different from what you do. For instance, I'm a social media strategist, I'm a speaker, and I'm an agency. There's thousands of people who do all of those things, but my focus is on getting people recognized and remembered as experts. I have friends doing the same job, but they have a different audience and they have a different focus. Maybe they're building influencers. It's very different.

Your competitors are going to be your best community members for that reason and for the reason that the algorithms will get to recognize what your account is about. When you're hobnobbing with your competitors, they're like, "Oh, they're in this industry and this is their niche. We know who to send their content to, so it's going to help your reach." Those are the pieces of the followers and following.

That explains the Instagram profile. I told you that I would help you get people to do stuff.

I've got a couple of tips for you. Tip one, I talked about the follower and following, but what you didn't know is that there's this thing called the popularity score. Really, what that just means is that the Instagram algorithms judge accounts by how "popular" it is or what I like to say is how valuable it is because I'm not an influencer, I'm a business owner, and I want to sell a service. My account is kind of popular because I have 29,000 followers and I'm only following under 800. When you follow a lot less people than are following you, your popularity or your value score goes up and that helps your content get more reach. It helps all of the things about your account do better. When you're following people, make sure that they are people who are going to interact with your account and they're going to be part of your community. You want to follow like half as many people as they're following you. As your account grows, you'll start attracting people because of the value of the account and you won't need to follow them back. You will have a core of people that will be your friends, they'll be your business besties as you grow your account.

I'm still friends with about a thousand people now. It's probably like a thousand people in my circle that I started with. I mean, it started with a couple, right? And then it grew and it grew and it grew. Now there's like a thousand people that I know that are in my industry that are still my friends. They're people I can call up and say, "I need help." They're people that support my content. They're people that send me leads now. You'll want to build that community of followers and people that you follow. So choose wisely when you're following and try to keep your following less than how many are following you.

Another tip is that you're going to set this thing up and you're going to feel like it's not perfect. I don't exactly know what I do. I'm not quite sure about my wording. I don't have everything perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. Get it out there. When I started, I started as consulting by Tony and then I evolved to crush your engagement because I got really good at engagement and later to ended up crush your social. So my account has actually changed names three times and the messaging has changed many, many times as I got more clear on what I wanted to talk about on the platform. So you'll start with something and it will change and evolve over time and you'll get better and better at it. But don't wait, get it out there, start cranking the content out and then later when you get enough followers, you can analyze it and see what's working and then you can start to evolve. But if you don't start, you wait till it's perfect. You're never going to do it. So just get it out there and get going. And the third part is to get feedback from people in your industry. The people who are your competitors, the people who maybe have the same client base but sell something different than what you sell. Ask them for feedback. Do you think this is a clear bio? What do you think I should talk about? Do you like this picture? Is it clear what I do and how I help?

Because that feedback will be super valuable in shaping your account as you grow.

So to recap, this episode was about your Instagram bio and your profile page. So we covered the name or the username section or to be cool, your handle and that's how people find you. Business name, right? Think business name. We covered the photo, which hopefully is a photo of your face smiling at the camera, branded of course. We covered followers versus following and what that means. We covered the headline section, which we want to have a name, a first name and some key words that people would use to find you. And remember, it can only be 40 characters. We covered the bio section, which is 150 characters and should describe the kind of value you're going to provide on your page, which really means what you're going to talk about. And then we talked about the CTA. You want people to do something when they get to your page. You want them to follow you. You want them to check out your content. You want them to check out your free guide or whatever lead magnet you have, or maybe you want them to check out your website, whatever that is. Make sure you have a CTA. That's all for now. Let's crush it.