Instagram’s business profiles are being used by more than 25 million marketers

More businesses are looking to do business through Instagram.

More than 25 million marketers have switched their Instagram accounts to business profiles, the company announced on Thursday. That’s up from 15 million business profiles on the Facebook-owned app as of July 2017.

Instagram rolled out business profiles — the equivalent of Facebook Pages — in May 2016 to give companies a more commercial presence on the photo and video app. By converting an account to a business profile, companies can include a “contact us” button on their pages and view in-depth analytics about the organic posts and Stories they publish on the app, such as the number of impressions and unique reach posts received.

Instagram’s hope is that the more tools it offers to marketers, the more that marketers will use Instagram to boost their business, organically and eventually through advertising. That strategy appears to be working. Since Instagram rolled out business profiles, its advertiser base has ballooned from more than 200,000 in February 2016 to more than 2 million in September 2017. That puts Instagram’s ratio of organic business accounts to advertisers roughly in line with Facebook, which has more than 70 million businesses using Pages and more than 6 million advertisers.

Eighty percent of Instagram’s 800 million monthly users follow a business, and roughly 40 percent of the 500 million people who check Instagram daily view at least one business’s profile, according to the company. Of the 200 million-plus people that view a business profile on a given day, two-thirds don’t follow the brand. That last stat makes a strong case for Instagram’s business profiles. While marketers may hope non-followers tap the follow button, they would likely be just as satisfied, if not more so, if these people tap the button to contact their businesses, enabling them to cultivate a customer base outside of the app.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.