Why Athletes & Influencers Need To Switch To Instagram’s Creator (or Business) Profiles

Dec 9, 2019 | Insights

3 Key Takeaways

  1. Instagram drives nearly 70% of brand value, so if you (or your athlete) aren’t on Instagram with an account that can be measured, you’re missing a big opportunity.
  2. Creator Accounts were built for athletes and influencers, allowing them to see data on their followers in order to create better content. These accounts DO NOT stifle engagement or reach. (See section titled “What do athletes gain through an Instagram business profile”)
  3. Want to know how to switch? Jump to the section titled “How to convert a personal Instagram profile to an Instagram Business profile” and you’re all set.

Why Make The Switch?

Having a presence on Instagram has become expected for athletes and ambassadors today, not only by fans but also brands looking to partner with the athlete. After all, Instagram is the top value driver for brands – the platform drove more than $430M in Maximum Ad Value (MAV) during the first 9 months of 2019. Also, 68% of the total value driven by sport properties and influencers came through Instagram. By giving athletes a channel to drive such value for brands, Instagram is one of the best places to maintain an online presence.

A personal Instagram profile may be a good place to start, but to further improve reach and gain valuable analytics, it becomes necessary for a brand and its sponsored properties to convert their personal Instagram account to an Instagram Creator or Business account (Both of these will work, and have their own unique advantages). Instagram Business stats are mind boggling – there are over 25M Instagram Business profiles worldwide, more than 200M instagram users visit at least one Business profile everyday, and ⅓ of the most viewed stories on Instagram are from Business accounts. As the Creator account becomes widely adopted, we expect to see similar if not higher stats for Creator profiles, making them the way to go for an athlete that wants to drive value for sponsors.

Differences between Personal, Creator, and Business profiles on Instagram

One of the major advantages of Instagram Creator and Business accounts is the ability to access realtime stats about the performance of posts, stories, and audience. Without a Creator or Business account, brands can only make assumptions about their followers, audiences, reach and post engagement. A personal Instagram profile is severely limiting for a brand and its sponsored properties. Sponsorships are a crowded market so proving value is an absolute necessity to compete in the marketplace. Athletes, influencers, and sports properties should take steps to ensure that the value they are generating for brands is measurable. Sponsorship measurement platforms like Hookit cannot measure the social performance of brand ambassadors if they don’t have a Creator or Business account, causing value that is being created to be lost. The one caveat to this is if an ambassador authenticates their account with Hookit’s Pro Account tool.

What do athletes gain through an Instagram business profile

By switching to a Creator profile, athletes and influencers can get more data to:

  • Prove their value to sponsors – Instagram social engagement and brand promotion values can only be measured from Creator or Business profiles. No data is available for sponsorship measurement from personal profiles, so athletes and influencers who have a strong presence on Instagram lose out on being able to prove their effectiveness to partners without a Creator or Business profile.
  • Improve their presence – Using the rich data available from a business profile, Hookit can help make sense of a sponsored property’s social performance. It can provide a detailed analysis of what works and doesn’t work and how the property can tweak their posts to drive maximum value. See more on the Hookit Pro Account for individuals and sports properties here.
  • Get audience and post insights – Hookit helps sponsored properties understand their audience/followers with a breakdown by age, gender, location, optimum times to reach their followers and more. This helps athletes tailor their content to reach the right audiences with the right message at the right time. Also a good understanding of the type of content that resonates with audiences can be gleaned through additional metrics like Instagram stories metrics and post impressions which are only available for Instagram Business profiles.

Brands can measure the complete value of their sponsorship efforts by ensuring that each of their sponsored properties have an Instagram Creator or Business profile. 

Busting Myths / Alleviating Concerns

One major concern of athletes and influencers when switching to Creator or Business accounts is the worry that engagement or reach will be reduced by Instagram’s algorithms.

The Truth: Hookit conducted a study of over 2500 individuals who switched to a Business or Creator account in the past year. When looking at the likes & comments per post before and after switching, the results were clear: influencers saw a 10.1% increase in engagement after switching to a Business or Creator account.

Ready to switch? Let’s do it.

How to convert a personal Instagram profile to an Instagram Creator profile 

Switching to an Instagram Creator or Business account is easy. Once a personal Instagram profile is set up, follow the below instructions to convert it into a Creator or Business account.  

Brands can also follow the steps to connect their Business account to a Facebook Page associated with the business. This step is optional and will make it easier to use all of the features available for businesses. 

Make the switch

Hookit takes out the guesswork for brands by helping them understand their Instagram Business data as well as glean valuable insights to earn higher sponsorship value. For sponsored properties, data from their Creator or Business profiles combined with a powerful tool such as Hookit can help them understand how to be a better promoter who drives maximum value for their sponsors. 

By converting to an Instagram Creator profile, ambassadors gain the opportunity to garner more engagement through advanced understanding of post analytics and audiences. This allows brands and their partners to tailor their posts and increase engagement, reach, and value driven. Also, coupling a Creator profile with Hookit’s Pro Account for athletes does an incredible job at bringing everyone involved a better end result.

Note about privacy

Hookit fully respects the privacy of all individuals and holds this in the highest regard when it comes to data. Personal data is just that, personal, and not something that Hookit has any interest in storing or using. No personal data (including passwords and personal info) is shared when switching to a Business or Creator account as an individual and authenticating with sponsorship measurement platforms like Hookit. Remember, you can always un-authenticate at any time and request that all your profile engagement data be fully removed from the Hookit platform as per GDPR guidelines. Authentication simply allows you to access more metrics and share these metrics in order to prove brand value. So rest easy and promote your partners knowing your data is yours to keep.

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