Instagram has become the marketing platform of choice for many athletes, influential people, and influencer marketing experts. But while massive follower counts and thousands of likes per post provide a glimpse of an individual’s campaign potential, sophisticated marketers are hungry for insights that push beyond vanity metrics.
Beginning in 2019, Instagram launched an initiative to make deeper analytics available to individuals, making creator profiles available to all users. According to Instagram, creator status is “Best for public figures, content producers, artists, and influencers.”
The launch of creator profiles works to separate businesses from individuals on the app. Creator profiles offer capabilities built specifically to help influential individuals rather than businesses or organizations. By changing their status to creator, individuals can better understand their audience, content effectiveness, and ultimately, better market themselves to interested businesses and collaborators.
Tools and Features for Instagram Creator Profiles
Making the switch to a creator profile is simple and most notably, provides users with access to the Instagram Creator Dashboard, offering deeper insights for their audience, activity, and growth. These insights are not only valuable to the creator, but also for marketing and content partners to better understand post performance and to optimize content for future influencer marketing initiatives. Switching to a creator profile can also increase the individual’s likelihood to be verified.
Audience Insights
Creators can better understand who their followers are (age, location action, etc.) and craft more effective content strategies to fit that audience.
Activity Insights
Activity insights helps users understand how and when people engage with an account. It also tracks the total impressions and reach of content published by the creator account over the past seven days.
Daily Follow and Unfollow Data
Creators can better understand how specific content impacts follower growth (or loss) by tracking daily follows/unfollowers. This data was previously only available via third-party apps that are no longer connected to Instagram’s updated API.
Managable Messaging
Influencers’ and athletes’ DMs are often flooded with fans, haters, and offers with various levels of legitimacy. Creator profiles make messaging more manageable for the individual by allowing the creator to filter direct messages in three folders: Primary, General, and Requests.
This provides creators control to prioritize messages from friends and brands, while filtering messages from fans to a single folder.
Specific Labels
With an Instagram creator profile, individuals can better brand themselves with an accurate label. Creators can select labels like artist, athlete, etc., and choose to display or hide the label on their public profile,
Switch to Instagram Creator Profile
Before switching to Professional Instagram Account, users will need to create and/or already have Admin access to a Facebook Page, which is required to complete the Instagram account conversion from personal to professional.
- Open your Instagram App
- Tap the hamburger menu (≡) in the upper right corner
- Tap ⚙ Settings
- Tap Account
- Tap Switch to Professional Account
- Tap Creator
- Review the features and tap Next
- Select a category that best describes you (example: Athlete, Public Figure, etc.) and choose if you would like to display it on your profile or not. Then tap Done
- Tap Edit Profile
- Tap Connect or Create next to Page under Profile Information
- Tap Connect Existing Page if you already have a Facebook Page or tap Create Facebook Page if you still need to create one
- Select (or create) the Facebook Page you would like to connect
- Tap Done in the upper right corner
