Yes, you need a personal account and a business account

One of the most common questions I hear in my social media classes is, “Should I have a business account in addition to my personal account?” Yes.

You should create a separate social media profile for your business. 

What does that look like?

On Facebook, you likely already have a personal profile where you have friends and post updates and videos for your friends and family.

In addition to your personal page, you should also create a business page.

On Instagram, if you already have an account created you can switch it from a personal account to a professional account. Or, go ahead and create a brand new account solely for your business labeled from the start as a professional account.

Why? It all comes back to staying on brand. 

A personal account should be for personal content. Your family, pet, vacation photos, etc.

A brand account should solely focus on your brand. It’s purpose, mission, service, etc.

It’s so important to keep these two separate not only for some personal/ professional life balance, but to ensure that content you post on a brand account always stays on brand.

Data tells us that people will unfollow accounts if content goes off brand. So if you are posting a mix of personal and professional content on the same profile, this creates a problem. You likely have followers who are only interested in your business content and when they see unrelated content they are more likely to hit the dreaded unfollow.

Now, this can become a grey area when you as a person are your brand.

Take real estate agents for example. Many agents are selling themselves and need to lean into their personal connections to promote their service. And that’s OK! I would still recommend having two accounts; one account where you share your personal content and another account solely dedicated to content about your business.

This all goes back to a user’s expectation once he/she hits follow.

If I follow a real estate agent’s Instagram, I’m going to expect to see posts about available listings. Not what the agent ate for lunch that day. This is would be off-brand and is likely going to make me unfollow the account. See the No. 2 reason below why consumers unfollow brands.

Once you separate the two accounts, be sure to cross promote your content.

Remember, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle?”

Let your followers know that you have another page and ask them to follow it. Share content from your business page to your personal page. This will increase your reach while maintaining that separation.

THE BENEFITS OF HAVING A BUSINESS ACCOUNT

Besides staying on brand with your content, there are a number of perks to having a business account.

• Analytics. This is huge and the main reason you should immediately make the switch. Instagram gives you free data that is not provided on a personal account. You’ll definitely want to take advantage of this perk.

• The potential to purchase advertisements.

• Only business accounts are able to use third-party scheduling tools like Later or Buffer.

Now that I’ve hopefully convinced you, here’s further instructions on how to create a Facebook business page and an Instagram professional account.