3 Quick and Easy Instagram Branding Tips
While these are definitely not new features on Instagram, it’s nice to take a second to evaluate and audit our presence on the app!
In a visual world, standing out in your target audience’s mind is important. You want that mental real estate. Luckily, Instagram has been rolling out features for years that allow you to tap into that brand recall and recognition potential. I’ll be using both my personal account and the business account I operate as examples.
Let’s get to the nitty gritty.
1. Optimize Your Bio
The first stop on our optimizing tour is your Instagram bio which should be doing a fair amount of leg work for you. Instagram is moving closer to a keyword-centric search so making sure that relevant keywords appear in your bio will tell IG exactly what your account is about and help serve your content up to users who would be interested.
Below is a good example of 2 branded and optimized bios:
For both, you know exactly what to expect from the account without looking at the grid below.
From this bio, you can assume that you’ll see social media, art, cosplay, lifestyle, and Twitch content on this account.
From this bio, you can conclude that renderings, animations, photography, cinematography, and branding content will be shared; each of these keywords fall under the larger umbrella of visual marketing.
I opted for a more subtle approach to my personal account’s keyword inclusion and more direct, compact inclusion for the business account. It’s up to you to decide how to include the keywords you’d like to rank for just make sure they’re relevant to the content you share!
Tip: Use fun fonts in your bio from igfonts.io to add some personality!
2. Take Advantage of Stories Highlights
Instagram has allowed users to “highlight” stories they’ve shared since 2017 and it’s a great way to share company culture, showcase personal projects, and compile relevant stories you’d like to keep around for more than 24 hours. It’s basically like a tiny photo album right on your profile!
For my personal account, I chose to group critical stream announcements, random life happenings that may affect the content I post (such as a convention I attended or content features/appearances on prominent accounts) and behind-the-scenes content from my favorite costume build.
For the business account, we chose to highlight company culture, our team biographies, and eventually will include the various services we offer. In essence, it functions as a mini website with navigation links above the grid. Visitors can learn more about the brand without ever leaving the app.
Choose a strategy before you begin
Adding highlights can be a casual or highly-planned process. If it doesn’t matter what order your highlights appear in, feel free to add new collections as you see fit. But, if you want to plan out the aesthetic a bit more and have certain highlights appear in a specific order, remember this (and I’ll use my pink highlights as an example):
Collections will display in the order you add them going from right to left; right being the oldest and left being the newest. You cannot reorder your highlights as of now so plan this out if you want your collections in a specific order!
Highlighted stories will appear within the collection from oldest to newest. So the first image that will display will be the oldest and the last image will be the most recent. It’s easier to see in the video! Again, you cannot reorder these images so be mindful of the order you add them.
Never added a highlight? It’s super easy!
If the story you’d like to add is currently active, navigate to the story and at the bottom of the screen select “Highlight” and choose the destination Highlight collection.
If your story is not currently active, you’ll have to access it from your Stories Archive:
Whatever you decide to highlight for your followers and profile visitors, create a cover image for each highlight “album” to keep your profile looking cohesive like the icons pictured above.
Tip: Use free design websites like Canva if you’re looking for quick designs! I use Canva for almost every project to help maximize productivity.
3. Pin 3 Branded Posts to the Top of Your Grid
Finally, let’s take a look at Instagram’s latest profile branding feature, pinning posts to the top of your grid. You can choose 3 posts (Reels, carousels, or photos) that embody what your brand or profile is all about. Think of it like your Myspace Top 8 (showing my age?) only it says to the world, “These are the things that make me who I am, expect to see lots of this!”
I chose to create a dedicated banner graphic to fill those 3 slots using my brand colors, fonts, avatar, and exactly what visitors can expect to see. The graphics both announced and solidified my rebranding effort to current followers as well as attract new ones. Alone, each graphic is impactful in a user’s feed; together at the top of your grid, they send a powerful and cohesive branding statement to your audience.
When you’ve chosen or created the posts you want to pin, you’ll want to click the 3 dots above the photo and select “Pin to your profile”. Posts will pin in the order you select them from right to left; in other words, the post you want in the right pinned slot should be the first post you choose to pin.
If you choose to create a banner graphic like the one I created below, it’s super easy to do in Canva! Click “Custom size” on the top right of the home page and create a canvas size of 3240x1080 pixels. After your design is done and you’ve downloaded the PNG, upload your image to Image Splitter and set the splitter to 3 columns and 1 row. Export the images as either a jpg or png (I use png), upload them, and pin them to the top of your grid!
Wrapping Up
These 3 tips are just the beginning of what could become a fully-realized social media branding or marketing strategy. Once you’ve completed these quick updates to your profile, you’re ready to dig into a full audit or tackle a social marketing strategy!
Send me your account glow-ups below as a comment, I can’t wait to see what you create!
Kiersten “KP” Pavoncello
KP is a Digital Marketing Coordinator from York, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Southern New Hampshire in 2022 with high honors and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication. When she’s not knee-deep in social strategy, KP is usually playing her favorite video games and spending time with her husband, son, and two cats.