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

[Luffy]

Hey Guys! Over the last few months I have been studying and comparing the effects of an Instagram Business Profile vs Personal Profile on things like Engagement, Reach, Impressions, Virality, Explore Page etc.

I have done a case study on my main account which is a personal brand and the results have been quite shocking

First of all:

I have been in the IG game for years now with my main focus on growing personal brands and businesses of mine.

The thing that I have always paid attention to - whether it was IG or YouTube - was studying the elite of the game who are truly crushing it on every level. I am not talking about accounts with a couple 100k. I am talking about accounts with millions of followers reaching mainstream audiences. People that a lot of your friends will follow.

When I was confronted with claims that business profiles have lower engagement than personal profiles, I always shrugged it off thinking there is no other way. I mean after all, every body was doing it right. I always thought it was the thing to do if you took IG seriously so I had all my accounts on business profile pretty much from day one.

But here is the kicker - Not everybody is doing it.

In fact, when I was looking at and studying the biggest accounts, I noticed very few of them actually have business profiles, at least if they are a person (not talking about brands - more on that later).

You might be asking „Luffy, how can you even spot if someone is using a business profile or not?“

The answer is actually quite easy, although it took me a moment to realize.

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

• The Tagline/Business Category

Personal Accounts can’t have these yet business accounts are required to get these. You can’t not have this if you switched over to business profile. I tried multiple times.

• 3 Call To Action Buttons

If an Account has 3 CTA Buttons, meaning one more than the usual follow and message button, they have a business profile. As a business account you are required to at least have one contact option (phone or email) which leads to a third additional contact option. That is why lots of big influencers have their email and contact info in their bio - THEY ARE USING A PERSONAL PROFILE

Now looking at these factors and checking out lots of the biggest influencers, models, artists, entrepreneurs, public figures, people who just crush Instagram in general, I noticed most of them actually don’t have a business profile but a regular profile.

I also noticed some of the creators who were quite big but I heard complaining about lowered engagement over the last years, had switched to a business profile, probably just because it was the thing to do, right?

Knowing this as well as the constant rumors that a business profile lowers engagement, I was willing to do a case study on my accounts and test it out. The findings will surprise you.

Immediately after switching to a personal profile, I noticed my posts were seen and liked by a lot more of my own followers.

Followers that I have interacted with in the past and always wondered why they stopped liking and commenting on my posts.

Well it turns out, they just weren’t seeing them. Crazy, right.

Overall, I got most of my impressions from hashtags and explore before, but now my own audience likes went from about 400 per post to 1200 likes per post.

I also noticed that my story view impressions grew and generally it seemed like my account visibility was improved.

• Higher engagement
• Higher reach
• More likes from existing followers
• Better chance of hitting explore
• More visibility
• More story impressions
• More interaction through DMs

Was it worth it? Hell yes!

Now these results aren’t surprising if you think about some of the previous posts we had discussing if Instagram lowers your engagement if you buy ads through their accounts:

• Buying Ads Can Ruin Your Account (My Story)
• Instagram Ads | Account Trust Scores & Reach

The results were that most people actually got lower engagement when they had run ads at one point or another.

The reason being Instagram wants your money and if you have bought ads once, they will lower your organic reach so that you keep buying ads.

Who would be surprised if they do the same thing with a business profile. They want to hook you by lowering your organic reach so that you give them money to increase it again. Because surprise, surprise, you actually need a business profile to run ads and promote your posts.

Knowing this, switching to a business profile only really makes sense if you really are a business selling goods and services and preferably directly through ads. In that case, your main objective probably isn’t getting as many followers and organic reach as possible, but generating direct revenue by targeting people with your ads.

One thing that I have always wondered was how influencers - people who are depended on brands collaborating with them - can use personal profiles if you can’t see your analytics?

Well it turns out there are some external apps that can give you your analytics. I haven’t tested any of these out personally yet but will in the future:

• Sprout Social
• Iconosquare
• Phlanx
• TapInfluencer
• Curalate
• Union Metrics

In my experience, switching to a business profile only makes sense if you are a business selling goods or services and you plan on using ads.

In other cases, especially if you are trying to build up a legit brand account (which should always be the longterm goal IMO), you are better off sticking to a personal profile.

Next step is checking out IGs new creator profile. Have any of you already checked out this feature? What where your experiences?

Also what are your experiences regarding business profile vs personal profile! Let me know!

Thanks!

[JackGagger]

I tested this as well on a couple of my accounts and got the exact same results as you.

[Luffy]

Thanks for the answer! Quite interesting how Instagram and Facebook seem to handle these things.

[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.