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Felicia Lehoullier
There are so many great photographers on Instagram that let themselves down with the management of their accounts. Things like the choice of username, the use of poor quality profile pictures, or the excessive use of hashtags and emojis are just a few cardinal sins that I see on a regular basis. While I appreciate that many will think these issues are insignificant, I strongly believe that every single element of your profile should be pulling in the same positive direction.
Your profile picture is in effect your logo. It's the first thing people see at the top of your profile and it's quite often what is used to identify an account. If you think about it, how often do you actually read the names in your feed? Personally, I can recognize many of the accounts I follow by their tiny profile pictures alone. It's for this reason that changing your "logo" too regularly could have a negative effect on your account. If users don't recognize you when they are quickly scrolling through their feed then they may engage with you much less. While I'm not saying you have to keep the same 10-year-old selfie forever, you may want to upgrade the picture with something in a similar vein to what your audience is already used to seeing or associating you with.
I shouldn't have to mention this to fellow photographers but you would be surprised how often I see poorly cropped, blurred, or even pixilated profile pictures. We should know better and really have no excuse for not having a decent picture. Make sure the image you have uploaded is of the maximum resolution that Instagram currently allows. Also, don't forget to check how that profile picture looks on a bigger screen like a laptop. Many art directors or clients may look you up while they are sat in front of their computer so it's best to make sure everything looks good on all devices. If a client sees an inferior quality profile picture they may have second thoughts about hiring you. This might sound extreme but you don't want to plant any negative seeds of doubt in someone's mind. People do often judge a book by its cover.
You can only use 150 characters in your bio which in my opinion is far too generous. I'm sure you've seen people writing their life stories in this field and the majority of the time it just detracts from the images. Less is most definitely more when it comes to writing your bio. Accurately describe yourself in as few words as possible so people can quickly get onto looking and engaging at the pictures on your profile. One trick well worth taking advantage of in this field is the use of the line break. Some versions of Instagram don't have a return key available to make new lines in the app. This can make your bio look like one unreadable block of text.
Instagram now allows you to add clickable hashtags and usernames in your bio which is the single worse thing you can do to your account. Anything other than your URL should not be clickable if you want visitors to your profile to stay and engage on your page. Not only will these clickable links give users an easy exit off your page, but they clutter up your bio and add nothing to the searchability of your account. As I have already mentioned, the only two places Instagram uses to generate search results is your username and the name field. Adding #Canon or #WeddingPhotography to your bio will only make your page look busy and maybe attract some unwanted bot traffic.
While a few carefully selected emojis can enhance an Instagram profile, the wrong ones can actually do more harm than good. The real point I want to raise about emojis is that they are not as universal as people may think. Unless the user has the most up to date operating system or web browser they may not even be able to see the full range of emojis on offer. If this is the case, some people visiting your emoji-filled page will be greeted with ugly blank boxes instead of colorful icons.
Switching your Instagram account to a business one will give you several benefits but I'm not overly convinced they are worth having. While the additional insights and analytics on your profile might be interesting to see, I think there are better uses of your time than obsessing over the numbers. I'd also have serious reservations about declaring to Facebook, Instagram's owner, that you are now a "business." Business owners on Facebook continue to reach fewer and fewer of their audience and the only way it seems to be able to break out of this throttling is by paying for the privilege.
I'd also argue that the extra contact buttons which Instagram gives out to business accounts are not worth having either. While a few extra buttons on your account might increase accessibility to places away from Instagram, they don't help to improve the engagement on the social network itself. Those extra buttons are just more clutter, distraction, and another opportunity for users to leave your account and not interact with your actual profile.
Everything on your account should be both professional and visually appealing. This equally applies to the URL you use on your profile page. Not only does a bunch of random numbers and letters on the screen look amateur, but by making it hard for someone to remember a link you massively reduce the chance that they'll visit or share the URL in the first place. If the link you need to use can't be changed there's nothing wrong with using something like TinyUrl which is a URL shortening web service that will make your links less unsightly and much more memorable.
Just rustled this up to illustrate how many potential obstacles/distractions we can put in front of our work on Instagram. The example on the right is how my profile currently looks and how I intend to keep it...
NOBODY CARES ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHERS. That's the lesson to be learned. I don't care who makes the coke bottle, pours coke into it or even who invented it, I just want the coke. What's in the picture is what people are looking at and all the tricks in the world aren't going to replace that. And if you're lucky enough to create that image that the world will go nuts for, Zuckerberg is going to hide it somehow. And now anyone can buy all the boost likes they want so don't let someone else with more likes bother you. Chances are those likes aren't even real.
From an aesthetic perspective, any repetition of words on your profile could look a little busy and unnecessary in my opinion. As far as I know, Instagram only looks at the username and name field when generating its search results so if you want to catch people searching for "photographer" then maybe put it in your name field.
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