Whether it’s the first day of school, a first date, or a job interview, a good first impression makes you memorable and interesting.
But what does a good first impression look like on Instagram for publishers? And does it even matter?
The Instagram bio is the very first thing a person sees when looking at your page, or in other words, it’s their first impression. The content in your bio could influence whether or not you get another follower.
What to Include When Writing an Instagram Bio
Both Sproutsocial and HubSpot agree that some key features to include in an Instagram bio are a link, a hashtag, an emoji, a call to action, and an engaging tone.
To see how these features transfer to the field of publishing, I randomly selected 10 publishing companies on Instagram with over 100,000 followers and 10 publishing companies on Instagram with fewer than 100,000 followers. I then analyzed their bios to see if they included the first three features: links, hashtags, and emojis.
Because determining a call to action and the tone of a bio can be more subjective, I had another person also code for those features using the following codebooks:
Call to Action: Call to action will be classified if they ask you to click something, look at something, or do something.
Tone: Tone will be classified as either formal or informal.
To get a sense of our agreement, I calculated our agreement and inter-rater reliability, which had 80% agreement (0.524 Cohen’s Kappa) for calls to action, and 90% agreement (.802 Cohen’s Kappa) for tone.
What the Research Shows
After gathering the data, I compiled it into the below lists to then analyze the results.
Bio features of publishing companies with over 100,000 followers:
- all 10 companies include a link
- 1 company includes a hashtag
- 4 out of 10 companies include an emoji in their bio
Bio features of publishing companies with fewer than 100,000 followers:
- all 10 companies include a link
- 0 companies include a hashtag
- 4 out of 10 companies include an emoji in their bio
Call to Action:
- 3 out of 10 publishing companies with over 100,000 followers include a call to action
- 2 out of 10 publishing companies with fewer than 100,000 followers include a call to action
Informal vs. Formal Tone:
- 7 out of 10 publishing companies with over 100,000 followers use an informal tone in their bio
- 4 out of 10 publishing companies with fewer than 100,000 followers use an informal tone
Where Do We Go from Here?
This data indicates that both larger publishing companies and smaller publishing companies are doing almost the same thing in their Instagram bios when it comes to including a link, a hashtag, an emoji, and a call to action. Utilizing these features may be beneficial, but it may not be what attracts the most followers.
From the data gathered, we can infer that using an informal tone is what sets apart companies with a bigger following from those with a smaller following. Companies with a smaller following might find it helpful to use a more informal tone to connect with followers and create that memorable first impression they’re seeking.
Taking the time to carefully write an Instagram bio with these key features could set apart a publishing company from the rest.
Read more about Instagram best practices on Bookmark.