Have you ever clicked through a profile link because you had no idea what the person was about?

I have.

• I’m on a profile
• I can’t make sense of the post images
• Their profile description doesn’t help me
• I click through to their web site
• “Oh, now I understand”
• And immediately leave

Clicks from Confusion Don’t Count

If we are directing traffic to our site because people are confused by our profile then all we are doing is increasing the bounce rate on our landing pages.

With all prospects we want to preselect them as much as possible. Ideally, we want people hitting our landing page because they want to take action, particularly from a call to action in our posts.

What do to instead

The last time this happened to me, I tried to figure out what the Instagram account could have done differently to avoid my click bounce.

I realised that the description in their profile was not being used effectively.

Here’s what my profile looked like prior to learning this lesson:

“Digital Online Tactics Tactics to help grow your business online. Lessons learned from growing my business. talotics.com”

The above was my first attempt. And I realised that there was really no hint about what talotics.com was, or why you would want to visit it.

And here is what it looks like now:

“Digital Online Tactics Tactics to help grow your business online. Lessons learned through application. Plenty of tips, and articles to read when you visit the website: talotics.com”

I had to edit down the copy because Instagram only allows 150 characters, but I think removing the repeated “grow, growing” and repeated “business” helped in general. But now there is a description of talotics.com, a reason “tips and articles” and an indirect call to action “when you visit the website”

Do you “See Link In Profile”?

This is probably even more important if you use the “See Link In Profile” tactic.

Because Instagram only allows one clickable link, and it is in your profile. When people create a post that they want an embedded URL for. They often change their profile link to point to the link in the post.

Since:

• this link varies
• we rarely edit old posts to remove the “See link in profile”
• the link might be random for a profile visitor

By amending the profile description to describe the link, then we increase the chance of an effective click through.

Another Example

My Consultancy site profile description was:

“Software Testing Tips & Videos I test things and help people test better. How can I help you? ►blog.eviltester.com ►javafortesters.com ►seleniumsimplified.com ►compendiumdev.co.uk www.compendiumdev.co.uk/linkinprofile"

I have:

• A description of services.
• Some nifty unicode.
• Copy and paste links to my other sites
• A custom built ‘see link in profile’ page which curates links - its cool, check it out

But I decided to improve this based on my experience.

“I test things and help people test better. Can I help you? Visit my site for articles, books, and online courses:”

When editing the profile we don’t add the url in the profile, Instagram displays our description and then the link so by ending the description with a “:” it makes the display render nicely - this might even work well as a unicode character.