Having a killer Instagram bio is an absolute must for businesses.
It’s the first impression your brand makes on potential followers, and it sets the stage for your entire Instagram presence.
Your Instagram bio tells newcomers to your profile who you are and what you do.
It sets the tone for how you communicate with your followers.
And most important of all, it encourages your target audience to press the big blue Follow button. More followers mean more eyeballs on your content and — hopefully — more conversions.
With so much riding on so few words, you’d be forgiven if you spent days with your fingers suspended over your keyboard, wondering what on earth to say. So we’ve put together this guide to help.
Here’s how to write an Instagram bio that connects with your target audience and persuades them to stick around and engage with your brand.
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What is an Instagram bio?
An Instagram bio is the short section at the top of the social media platform that sits under your username and over your pinned stories and grid. It typically includes:
- Your business name
- Space for a brief description, with a 150-character limit — this is the meat of your bio and should reflect your brand identity
- Space for links and other contact information, such as your phone number or business address
Source: Instagram
Because your Instagram bio is the first thing users see when they land on your business profile page, it’s useful to approach it like an elevator pitch.
In other words, you should aim to set out your business’s unique value proposition and get your brand’s personality across as clearly, concisely, and compellingly as you can.
Depending on what your business does, you might also want to include hashtags you use frequently in your content. And, if they fit with your tone of voice, you could also add emojis for more personality and a visual boost.
We’ll talk about hashtags and emojis in more detail a few paragraphs farther down.
Why does an Instagram bio matter so much?
Instagram bios are the first introduction to your brand on one of the most popular social platforms worldwide. This tiny parcel of digital real estate is critical for several reasons:
First Impressions Matter: Your Instagram bio is your online handshake. As a business, you have roughly 50 milliseconds to make an impression on the web. That’s how long users take to form an opinion about your brand, and that impression determines whether they’ll stay or leave. It’s essential to capture interest and deliver value in split seconds.
Crystal Clear Message: A well-structured bio clearly articulates who you are and what you do. This clarity helps potential followers understand your business and its offerings, guiding them to decide whether they want to engage with your brand.
Personality and Brand Voice: Instagram bios provide an excellent opportunity to express your brand’s personality and voice. This can set the tone for your overall Instagram presence, differentiating you from competitors and resonating with your target audience.
Call to Action (CTA): A strategic CTA within your bio can direct users to take a specific action, like visiting your website, purchasing a product, or registering for an event.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Instagram has a domain authority of 94, making it a powerful tool for SEO. Using keywords and hashtags strategically in your bio can improve your search engine visibility, driving more organic traffic to your profile.
Connection with Your Audience: An engaging Instagram bio can create an emotional connection with your audience. Making a connection helps to boost brand loyalty and encourages audience interaction, helping to build a vibrant online community around your business.
What makes an Instagram bio “good”?
At the risk of sounding like we’re trying to dodge the question, it depends.
An Instagram bio is good if it helps you get closer to your business goals. And business goals are subjective, changing over time.
That said, most successful Instagram bios typically have the following three elements in common.
1. A good Instagram bio is informative
With only a fraction of a second to make a good impression, your Instagram bio isn’t the place to be coy. Tell people who land on your profile exactly what they should expect, so they can immediately decide if they want to follow you or not.
Paint brand Dulux does this brilliantly. The bio for their duluxuk Instagram account, where they share home decorating ideas and design inspiration, couldn’t be clearer.
Source: Instagram
But your bio doesn’t necessarily have to explain your Instagram account’s purpose.
You could describe your product and the idea behind it, like Dulux’s bio for the account they’ve created for their Heritage line of paints:
Source: Instagram
Or you could be practical, like Josephine’s Coffee, and provide your followers with your opening hours and a link to your menu.
Source: Instagram
Whichever direction you decide to go in, you should assume most people will give your bio only the most cursory of glances.
Your bio is home to the only method of getting users off the app and onto your website with a simple click. The pitch needs to be perfect. Decide on the most important things you’d like to convey in your Instagram bio and say them straight away.
2. A good Instagram bio is easy to read
It goes without saying, but you should keep your Instagram bio’s language as simple and straightforward as possible.
Remember this – about 54% of Americans read below a 6th-grade level. Don’t get caught up in industry jargon or complex lingo. Keeping your language clear, straightforward, and easily understandable ensures your message resonates with the widest possible audience.
Word choice and sentence structure aside, it’s worth playing around with your bio’s formatting, especially if you have a lot of information to convey.
Line breaks and lists make your bio more scannable and readable.
And using emojis as bullets, as Roku does, can increase reading ease by adding visual cues to the text:
Source: Instagram
White space is your friend.
Instagram business bios can quickly get cluttered with information. To make your bio a breeze to read, don’t shy away from using white space. It provides visual breaks, helping to separate different pieces of information and making your business profile look neat and organized.
Take a leaf out of Sean Smith’s playbook. This multi-talented personality cleverly uses white space to distinguish his various interests in his Instagram bio. This way, he ensures every aspect of his brand gets the recognition it deserves without overwhelming his followers. It’s a simple yet effective way to guide your audience through your brand story.
Source: Instagram
3. A good Instagram bio resonates with your target audience
It might sound corny, but your personality is your secret ingredient.
Showing off your personality grabs people’s attention and makes your brand more memorable and relatable. And when you’re competing with 200 million other businesses for potential customers with shrinking attention spans, that’s exactly what you need to do in order to stand out.
You can let your personality shine through in your Instagram bio in many different ways.
Fintech company Curve, for instance, uses a not-so-subtle but funny reference to the popular Lord of the Rings franchise:
Source: Instagram
It works because Curve is a financial industry disruptor, and most of its customers use its products precisely because they want to be able to access all their credit and debit cards from one place.
But you don’t have to be funny, witty, or irreverent to strike a chord. It really depends on what you think will resonate with your target audience.
Case in point, oat drink makers Oatly play up their nutritional and environmental credentials, positioning themselves as the go-to non-dairy alternative for fitness enthusiasts who care about the planet.
Source: Instagram
Flat-pack furniture titan Ikea, on the other hand, takes an even more straightforward approach. The bio kicks off with ‘Hey’ in Swedish, which calls out their roots, while the hand-waving emoji says friendly and approachable way better than any words ever could.
Source: Instagram
Instagram is your brand’s playground. You can be cheeky, serious, whimsical, or downright quirky. There’s no golden rule on how to showcase your brand’s tone and voice here. The secret sauce?
Know your audience and craft a bio that strikes a chord with them.
While Instagram offers flexibility, it’s crucial that your brand personality remains consistent across the digital world and even into traditional media. This harmony strengthens your brand identity and cultivates trust with your audience.
Remember, a jarring shift in tone across platforms can confuse followers and dilute your branding efforts.
And don’t forget — your Instagram bio isn’t set in stone. As your marketing campaigns pivot and evolve, your bio should dance along. This allows it to reflect current initiatives, keeping it relevant and as fresh as a daisy.
Launching a new product line? Taking a stand on a social issue? Your Instagram bio is a potent tool to amplify these shifts, sparking engagement and nurturing a deeper bond with your audience.
Nailing down your Instagram bio: 10 tips to go from blank to memorable
A good Instagram bio is informative, easy to read, and packed with personality. And it helps you further your business goals.
But how do you decide what to include in it? And how do you strike the right tone?
Here are our five top tips to help you get on the right track.
1. Know your audience…
Before you commit a single character of your bio to the blank page, you need to make sure you understand the people you’re writing it for.
Who are your target customers? What do they want from an Instagram account like yours?
The answers to these questions will determine what you focus on in your Instagram bio, how you say it, and also your conversion goal (we’ll talk about this in more detail in a minute).
If, for example, you’re mainly targeting professionals looking for a reliable product that helps them get stuff done, it makes sense to play up your expertise and experience, like Microsoft 365 does.
Source: Instagram
By contrast, if your target audience skews younger, you can probably get away with being more playful.
It’s worth putting together a buyer persona — a portrait of your ideal customer — to use as the basis for deciding which direction to take your Instagram bio in.
If you’ve been in business for a while, this could be a composite of your most valuable customers. Or, if you’re a service-based business, the customers you enjoy working with most.
Alternatively, you could analyze your competitors’ typical customers. What do they have in common? And what are they usually looking for when they land on your competitors’ profiles?
Over time, you can refine your persona and, in turn, your Instagram bio to make it more relevant and compelling.
2. …and know your brand
Knowing your audience is only one part of the equation. Your Instagram bio must also reflect your brand values. If you’re a fun, playful brand, your Instagram bio should reflect that. And the same goes if you want to be perceived as a reliable, no-nonsense brand.
Aligning your Instagram bio with your brand is important for two reasons.
First, it helps you make sure your brand is being perceived the way you want it to be perceived across all your marketing channels, which is how you attract your ideal customers.
Second, it keeps your brand consistent. This is critically important because consistency builds familiarity and trust.
If your website is light and plain-spoken, but your Instagram bio is written in a serious tone — or bangs on about innovative end-to-end solutions — your target audience is going to get confused.
At best, they’ll think your marketing team had an off day, and Legal stepped in.
At worst, they may think your account’s been hacked or belongs to a different brand altogether.
Either way, not good.
3. Be clear, to the point, and intentional
Once you’ve understood what questions your target audience wants your Instagram bio to answer — and how to make sure it’s on-brand — it’s time to put fingers to keyboard.
A good way to start is to jot down the key information your Instagram bio needs to include. What do followers absolutely need to know about you / your business / your Instagram account?
A lot of this will depend on your brand values and what your target customers want.
That said, depending on your business, some information may be essential.
If you’re a beauty parlor, for instance, you may want to include an external link to your calendar, so people can book online, your opening hours, and your address so people can find you.
Just make sure you include only the most relevant, useful information to make the most out of your 150 characters.
It may also be worth weaving some keywords into your bio.
Instagram bios aren’t searchable, so keywords won’t boost your bio’s visibility. That said, if there are specific keywords your target audience regularly uses on Instagram, including them in your bio can help make your account’s relevance more obvious at a glance.
Source: Instagram
Fastic, for example, uses ‘intermittent fasting’ and ‘fasting community’ in its bio, so the account’s purpose is instantly clear.
4. Pick your hashtags wisely
As we’ve mentioned, Instagram bios don’t appear in hashtag search results, but there’s a good reason you might want to include hashtags in your bio anyway: they direct your target audience to relevant content linked to that hashtag.
This is especially useful if you have a branded hashtag because it allows your target audience to see user-generated content your followers have posted with one click.
For example, clicking on home renovation blog Apartment Therapy’s branded hashtag displays over 4 million user-generated snaps of home improvement projects from around the world.
Source: Instagram
Adding hashtags you frequently use when you post is useful for the same reason — it helps users get to your content more easily.
The key is not to go overboard.
One or two hashtags can work well. But more than that, and you might start confusing users or come across as spammy.
More to the point — and as obvious as it sounds — if you’re going to use up precious characters for a hashtag, make sure it supports your goals. Don’t put hashtags in your bio just for the sake of having them.
5. Wrap things up with a strong call to action
Every good piece of marketing collateral should have a strong, clear call to action. And that includes your Instagram account.
Your choice of call to action will depend on your goals.
Say your aim is to build a community of engaged followers.
Your call to action could be as simple as asking people who land on your profile page to follow your account. Or you could ask followers to share photos using your branded hashtag or sign up for your email newsletter.
Similarly, if you want to make more sales, add a link to your online store. Etsy’s call to action, for instance, is a link to a featured products page.
Source: Instagram
Regardless of your goal, what’s important is that your call to action is as clear and specific as possible.
Your target audience should have no doubt about what action they should take, and what will happen when they take that action.
6. Use a link in bio tool
Instagram gives you just one chance to link out — a single precious clickable link in your bio. But here’s a pro tip: Get around this limitation with a ‘Link in Bio’ service. It’s like having a Swiss Army knife in your Instagram toolbox.
These services offer customizable pages where you can channel your followers to multiple destinations, each one tailored to their needs. Whether it’s your latest blog post, e-commerce store, or a sign-up page, you’re no longer stuck with a one-link-fits-all scenario.
The best part? You can ditch the tedious task of switching out links for each campaign. Plus, these link pages can be tailored to match your brand aesthetics. It’s like having your very own Instagram landing page.
And you won’t be alone. Around 31 million Instagram users are using Link in Bio services, with 49% hailing from America. It’s a trend on the rise and for good reason.
Source: Instagram
7. Announce news and updates
Got some thrilling news that’s too good to keep under wraps? Your bio is the perfect billboard for it. It’s a prime spot to complement your stories, reels, and feed posts with juicy updates about your brand.
Launching a limited-edition product or hosting an exclusive sale? Drive urgency with time-sensitive information. This nudges followers toward your call to action and gives them a reason to engage right away.
Your Instagram bio isn’t just a static placeholder — it’s a dynamic news ticker for your brand. Keep it fresh, keep it exciting!
Source: Instagram
8. Add related accounts
Running multiple Instagram accounts?
Partnering with a cool brand or influencer?
Don’t miss the chance to plug those handles right into your bio. This trick creates a clickable gateway from your profile to their content.
It’s not just about promoting your sister accounts or partners. This also helps guide your followers to the right spot for what they’re seeking. Whether they’re hunting for a specific product line or keen on your latest collab, you’re saving them time and effort. And let’s not forget, it’s also a boon for your customer service team.
Win-win, right?
Source: Instagram
9. Add a contact button
Want to streamline communication with your audience?
Add a contact button to your Instagram profile. Available on both iOS and Android, these handy buttons can direct your followers straight to your booking system, customer support, or any other point of contact you’d like to highlight.
By simplifying the way your audience reaches you, you’re not only enhancing their experience but also nurturing a more responsive and engaged community around your brand. It’s a small addition that can make a big difference!
Source: Instagram
10. Add your location
For local businesses, sharing your location on Instagram is a no-brainer. This feature allows you to list your address, which fires up Google or Apple Maps when clicked. It’s a digital “X marks the spot” for your brick-and-mortar shop.
By adding your location your Instagram bio, you’re giving customers the ability to find you swiftly and effortlessly. Whether they’re locals or just visiting, this feature makes it easier to turn Instagram followers into real-life customers. And while it’s only available on iOS and Android, it’s one detail that can make a world of difference for your business.
Source: Instagram
How to write a compelling Instagram bio for your business, in a nutshell
Because your Instagram bio can just as easily bring in more followers or scare them away, it’s easy to overthink it. But nailing down an effective bio doesn’t have to be a nerve-racking experience if you approach it the right way.
If you home in on what’s important to your target audience, keep things simple, and write with a clear and specific goal in mind, your Instagram bio will be better than a lot of what’s out there.
More importantly, though, a good bio is a work in progress, not a one-and-done deal.
Over time, your goals, your understanding of your customers, and even your customers themselves may change. Revising and refining your Instagram bio regularly will help you make sure it continues to support you on your chosen route to success.
