[CASE STUDY] My Shocking Findings On Business Profile vs Personal Profile 📈

[maxfinix]

Thank you for that. I will switch back and see how it turns out for me

[IGsocialize]

Thanks for sharing such a complete work.
But actually I just spotted a mistake:

There are 2 foolproof ways that give out a business profile:

This is not correct Creator Accounts have the same buttons and you can add
a title too.

Will read it later, I want to learn from your article.

[Actor_Contact]

Excellent work! I have been using a business profile for many months now

[Luffy]

True. I should have clarified that the account needs both, the category tagline and the 3 cta Buttons to be classified as a business profile

[IGsocialize]

What I meant is that what you described is not enough to determine if the account is business, could be creator account too, got me?

[embraceone]

switching to a business profile only really makes sense if you really are a business selling goods and services

Ten thousand percent this.

As a musician & composer I can say that there is no real reason for me to have Instagram for Business, or even a Creator Account to be honest. I’m never going to run ads because they lower reach, and I’m never really going to need business insights. It’s pretty obvious when a post is doing well in search / explore & hashtag results from the general engagement. Nobody ever buys my music as a result of Instagram, or even listens to it for that matter (outside of Instagram and IGTV), save a select few avid fans.

In terms of whether it lowers reach or not, I think that I summed it up quite nicely in a previous post:

How badly does changing to IG Business Account affect reach?

Switching to a business account will affect who your posts are shown to based on your business category. It may also affect which content is shown to you as well. It shouldn’t affect content which you’ve already posted, but will affect new content. It’s important that you choose a category which is most relevant to the content you’re posting. It will not throttle your post reach as most people claim, although in essence, by setting a category you are setting a niche industry for your posts to be classified as; this in itself may lower your post reach, but that really depends. Business insights are worth having for the small changes which occur as a result of the switch in my opinion.

Ultimately, you need to decide if they’re worth it for you. I find them useful on some accounts and useless on others.

In terms of reach, it makes sense that general reach will increase with a personal account because your posts will not be filtered by your business account industry choice, although it will be just that: general reach - a very loose audience, which is actually better in most cases. This is where hashtags become more important. You’ll reach a higher percentage of your audience because Instagram is not trying too hard to show your posts to a highly relevant business audience, but with the right hashtags you’ll reach them anyway. For all we know their algorithm isn’t even functioning as it should be. There’s a good chance that Instagram has just blotched the job.

Thanks for the insightful post and also for the feature! Appreciate it.

[roy]

Thank you for writing this detailed post and sharing the case study!

After the creator accounts rolled out, I switched from business to creator. I also wonder if it’s the same thing in case of a creator one because in the settings under ‘creator tab’ you also have the option to connect your Facebook account for paid promotion.

When someone had the same experiences with creator accounts like business accounts I will take into consideration to switch to personal. Although I would like to have the insights inside of the app but as @Luffy mentioned there are other ways to view insights as well.

@Alexnvo When I remember right, by reading your threads you mentioned you turned some of your accounts into creators too. I’m interested in your opinion on this because you are experienced with explore page reach and you analyze the reach on a regular basis.

[IGsocialize]

• How many accounts did you use for the study?
• What was the size of those accounts?
• What was the age?
• There were converted accounts? or from scratch BA or PA?
  Can you share the numbers so we can make our conclusions.

Cheers.

[Luffy]

Same here. The one account of the ones I switched back to personal is a musician account and it really only makes sense to do this if you are planning on running ads which in my personal opinion aren’t really that effective for musicians.

I get tons of musicians promoting their posts on my Instagram feed and they never really struck out to me. Not because of their content, just because of the way they promote themselves.

Also when I look at their accounts, I always see the same thing. One or two posts that they have promoted with ads that are doing pretty good but the others barely have any engagement.

Also the audience you gain seems not very loyal and committed to you as an artist.

[Luffy]

I was wondering the same thing about creator accounts. The one thing that makes me want one and the one feature that I am truly missing after switching back to personal is the in-app analytics. I just find it very odd and wonder how many of the creators who do not use business accounts present their stats to potential brand deals.

[Luffy]

I used three accounts for the study.

The main one is about 4k followers big and went from 400 likes to 1.2k likes from my audience.

The others were smaller but saw a similar increase in engagement.

Keep in mind none of these were botted accounts. All grown organically.

Age of the accounts is about 2-3 years.

They were turned business account pretty much from day one and recently turned back to personal after I learned about all this stuff.

[IGsocialize]

Thanks for the info, in my opinion is too small sample to reach a conclusion.

Also 4K account naturally will have better ER than a bigger account.

To really understand this, we need to test with a wide range of accounts, type, age, health, size.

Remember that all those parameters affects IG decision, the type of account is only one in the list. Narrow down the parameters so you can compare apples with apples.

You are in the right path…

[Luffy]

I agree about smaller accounts having better engagement, but the engagement has stayed the same for months until I switched back to personal when I saw a huge spike.

Ultimately yes though, a bigger sample size should be better.

That’s why included the part about lots of big influencer accounts that are personal. They must know a thing or two about this at least that’s what I think

[IGsocialize]

Ultimately yes though, a bigger sample size should be better.

Absolutely, I’m not saying that you didn’t see a dramatic change, what I mean, you understood, that could be that the change is the result of other things too not only the account type. If we see the same in 10 accounts will be other thing. Cheers!

[tiburoncin]

I agree about smaller accounts having better engagement, but the engagement has stayed the same for months until I switched back to personal when I saw a huge spike.

Ultimately yes though, a bigger sample size should be better.

That’s why included the part about lots of big influencer accounts that are personal. They must know a thing or two about this at least that’s what I think

I really like the analytics of the creator account, specially if you work with brands.

[Luffy]

That sounds cool!! What’s the difference between analyitics for creator accounts and business profiles? Also, have you seen any difference in reach between creator accounts and business profiles/personal profiles?

[tiburoncin]

It´s the same for creator an business, I was talking about switching to personal. Not much diference between business and creator from my trial.

[Luffy]

Ah I see, but aren’t there more stats that you can check through facebook for creator accounts or am I imagining things?

[Redis]

Thanks for sharing usefull case study👌

[Szr]

Thanks for sharing!

I personally noticed nothing. I have both personal and business accounts in the same niche and they get about the same engagement rate.