Episode 71: Optimizing Your Instagram Bio

Oh, hello, my beautiful pumpkins. I have decided that This summer, I'm going to do a series called summer shorts. Sorry if I stole someone's name or like, that's not all that original, but it is my attempt to do a little bit less this summer, but still bring you a lot of actionable, actionable, actionable bite sized tips.

So my goal with these summer shorts, and yes, I realize that like actual Quote, summer is not to like what, June 21st or something like that, but whatever, we're starting it now. And my goal is to have these episodes be at 10 minutes or less. So my request to you is, and this is not rhetorical, this is not just like, Oh, podcast coasts say things like this and they don't mean it.

My request to you is to please send me a DM on Instagram and tell me what topic I can cover for you in one of these summer shorts. Okay. The first one I'm going to do, I don't know if I'm going to call it a series because who knows if they're actually going to make sense all strung together, but you know, I'll try.

So the first one we're going to talk about today is very simple and it's going to be all about your Instagram bio. So here we go. Welcome to Holistic Marketing Simplified, a podcast for health and wellness professionals Looking to simplify their marketing. I'm your host, Molly Cahill, and this podcast is brought to you by my marketing roadmap, which is a five episode private audio training that's kind of like this podcast, but not exactly because it's not available to the general public when you search on your podcast feed.

So the great thing about consuming free content like this for me or on my Instagram or my blogs or whatever, is that. Yes, you will learn a lot, but you kind of have to go searching for what it is exactly you're looking for. This five episode private podcast is broken down in a logical step by step order.

It's why it's called a roadmap. If you're ready to get started on your Instagram marketing journey, or if you already are started and you're just feel like you're kind of like overwhelmed with all of the different free information, this is a. Super clear roadmap with lots of tangible step by step action items that will get you from point A to point B for just 27.

So all you have to do is head to mollycahill. com slash private training. And based on the reviews I've had so far, I know you won't be disappointed.

Hi, Kenosha, Wisconsin. And I listen to the Holistic Marketing Simplified podcast. All right, 10 minute timer. I'm setting it. Here we go. Instagram bio. This is a topic that I talk about a lot, and it's a topic that for some reason causes a lot of people's stress. And I'm here to tell you that there's no need to stress.

You can edit it. It's not etched into like a stone that's just going to like. Like live forever. Like you could change it anytime. I changed my Instagram bio probably three to four times a year. That's not strategic. It's just like, I'm sick of looking at it like that. I'm going to change it. Or as my business evolves, I changed my Instagram bio.

So don't get so stressed out, just put something out there and then if you want to change it, you can. I mean, the description of this podcast, I have changed what Haley, maybe three times, three to four times, four times maybe, and I'm only, I'm only on episode 70. So take the pressure off. This is not something that's literally going to be written on your tombstone and it can be changed at any point in time.

So here are just some more like brass tacks, nuts and bolts things to know about your profile is that there are only two fields on your entire Instagram profile that are searchable. Meaning when somebody goes into the search box on Instagram and starts typing in Britney Smith massage, whatever. Like if you want to make sure that you show up, then you need to have what I call the trifecta either in your at handle, which Instagram calls this, your username.

Or in the name line, if you are a visual person, don't do this while you're driving. But if you're listening to this and you're somewhere where you can look at your phone, you can go to your profile and tap edit profile and you will see the fields I'm talking about. So if you want to just listen to this, like finish listening to this episode and then maybe come back and listen to it again.

When you can actually have your phone in front of you too, it might make a little more sense if it doesn't the first time. So again, the only two fields when you hit edit profile are where you see username, which is again, your at handle. So for me, it's at Molly a Cahill and then your name line, that name line, you can usually fit anywhere in 45 ish to 50 characters.

I have scoured the interwebs for the exact number and I've never found it. If you could, if you know what it is, let me know. You don't want those two things to be redundant. So if I'm going to use, um, my personal, um, I call her my not therapist, April, who was actually on the podcast, April, hope you don't mind.

I'm going to use, use an example. If your Instagram handle, your username was April Adams, and then your name line was April Adams, And you are losing out on valuable real estate. I call it the trifecta because if you can, you want to include three things. Really I should, maybe it should be four because, but you can't always include four.

But if I had to pick three, it would be your name, like your actual name, the name of your business. If the name of your business is different and your location, if you serve a brick and mortar geographical audience. If your name and your business name are the same, obviously, then you know, you don't have to worry about the two of those things.

Also, if you look at my, um, Instagram profile, you'll see that my username or my handle is at Molly a Cahill, but then I also have Molly Cahill in the name line. That's because the, uh, Molly Cahill as a handle was. And the A in between, like the Molly A Cahill was making it to where I wasn't coming up in search.

Actually, I'm a water polo player, apparently. So I, to me, you know, it looks like I'm breaking my own rule by having my name twice. So if your username has like an initial or something funky like that in there, you might have to go put it twice. Um, a good way to test that is. I know a lot of you are in these kind of big conglomerate type Facebook groups, you could just kind of post there and be like, Hey, can you go try to find me on Instagram and see if I come up?

Um, you don't want to have a friend do it because the algorithm is smart and it knows like who you're closest with. So it's automatically going to show you friends first before it's going to show you somewhere else. That's why I say go have someone who's not already following you and someone who, um, Maybe it's not in your network or in your area.

Just ask them to try to find you on Instagram. So yeah, so the trifecta, like I said, is your name, your business name, and then your location. Now, let me give you some nuance y tips. exclusions, whatever. Molly, I have more than one doctor in my office. Who should I list in the name field? If it's you and you've been in practice for a while and you're well known in the area, then your name needs to go into that name field.

Cause you got to think this is about searchable real estate. It's not about like anything else. You can still, let's say you have like a new associate. Who's not really that well known yet or whatever. They can, you can still have their name, but just put their name in the bio portion, which I'm going to talk about in a little bit.

If you have like, if your city name is short, maybe you can get away with putting like To like if you go by your last name like you could get away with maybe two like for us We have like doctors Davis and Kessel then we have Raleigh Chiropractor, so you might be able to fit something like that you'll just have to play around with it, but my disclaimer here is Do not play around with it.

Do not, do not, do not in Instagram itself. It will lock you out if you try to change it more than twice in a 14 day period. And so whatever's there, you're stuck with. I use a free website, just Google like online character counter, and you can play around with it in there. If you are virtual only, then I would include and or like let's say you're in a really like you have a short name and you have a short city name and you can you have character real estate to add in like a keyword of some sort then you can put something in like you know menopause health coach.

This is not where you're going to get cutesy with cute names. These are things that people would actually think to So again, going back to April, my, um, not therapist, I call her again. Um, she jokingly refers to herself as a quote, mental hygienist, but she's not going to put mental hygienist in the name line because no one's searching that.

She could put that in her bio if she wanted to. I would like that because then it's like, you know, like shows her personality. But for that actual, like beautiful gold real estate of search, she has. women's trauma recovery specialists. Like I said, this is not somewhere you're going to get cutesy. If you have a really long city name and you can't fit it in there, don't make up some random abbreviation just to try to fit it unless that's something that people are actually searching.

So like people actually would call like, you know, Alexandria, like that whole area DMV. Like that's a very common thing someone would search. But if you just make up some like weird, You know, like I said, abbreviation that no one's using, then you might as well just leave that off. So if the name of your city is like way too long, that's okay.

You can leave it off only as an abbreviation. If it's a well known abbreviation people use, just make sure again, if you're looking at your phone under edit profile, I believe it's under contact options. Just make sure you've got your address listed. If you are virtual, still make sure that you at least have your city and state listed.

So I work from home and I'm virtual, so I don't have my home address listed on my Instagram, obviously. But I do have Cincinnati, Ohio. And I think it is a wasted opportunity when virtual coaches or, you know, you know, maybe functional medicine providers, whatever, Don't have their location somewhere in their bio because it gives people a connection point.

So if I'm trying to hire a life coach and I'm deciding between two different people, both of you have the same exact credentials, the same exact package price. One of you is geographically closer to me than someone else. Our brains are just hardwired to pick the person we have more in common with. So I'm just going to pick the person who's closer to me.

It's just how it works. It also gives people a jumping off point for conversation. So now that we've talked about like the searchable fields, let's talk about your profile photo. I am not a huge fan of a logo for a profile photo unless, again, you're like a really big like integrative clinic that has a lot of providers and if that is the case and you have.

text on your logo, then either have your designer like pull a version that doesn't have text or have like, if you need, like, if your logo is old, maybe you need to go onto like Fiverr or Upwork and have someone design. Some people call it a sub mark. If you're looking at websites, they call it like a favicon.

It's just a version of your logo that makes sense in a smaller Take care. I said version twice, but you know what I'm saying, go into the Instagram search bar and like just type in something like massage or whatever, and you'll see exactly why I don't like text on logos for Instagram. If you have like a photo of like, let's say like a leaf is that's, and that's your logo.

And then underneath you have like true health acupuncture clinic. In this tiny font in your profile photo, it's like, what the heck does that say? So instead you would want the full profile photo to be just the leaf. Like think about target. Like if target says target underneath the bullseye, that wouldn't be what they would choose as the profile photo.

They would choose the full bullseye. So we've talked about the searchable fields of your username and the name, we've talked about making sure your location's on there, and then we've talked about your profile photo. So let's wrap up with talking about what goes in the bio. Remember we said we're not going to stress about it, right?

We're not going to stress about it, we're just going to put something down. The first thing I would have you do is just try to put down the most basic version, like black and white, not fancy of what you do. I see. Pediatric. Prenatal. I see. Athletes, chiropractor, um, maybe don't put chiropractor again if it's already in your name line.

Um, but I would just start very, very like, it doesn't have to be fancy. Maybe you have like acupuncture, massage, dry needling, like maybe you just like list out your actual services and we're going to do all of this inside like that character counter. As I said. Then we're going to put a little spin on it.

Um, if we have space, this is where you're going to add your own unique colorful words. And, um, I'm going to like for that, it might be, you know, I put for one of my holistic marketing hub students, we put crappy periods. We put like Tension, back pain and crappy periods. It's like, okay, that's so funny because it's like so her, like that's so a word she would say.

So that's like her little, her little, uh, flair word, so to speak. Like I said, I want you to start just like with the most basic version of what it is you do. Don't worry about adding any like specific flair or anything like that right now because I'm going to do another summer short episode going over like a very short version of my messaging exercise.

Or you can go to mollykahle. com slash branding and that's where you can walk through my full messaging workshop that's going to help us really pull out some of those spicy, juicy They're talking to me a mint chocolate chip ice cream details, but for now, let's just make sure that the, like your bio is actually working and like a functional way, which is what you could do with all of these tips.

That's all I have for you today. See you next week. Thank you for listening to holistic marketing simplified and Hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast. Well, that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information.

So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day. And To leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly A. Cahill, that's C A H I L L. I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support.

I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.