← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
115. Your Instagram Profile Is Costing You Followers. Here’s How to Fix It for 2026
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Welcome to another episode of Call Her Creator, powered by Stan. I am your host, Kaitlyn Rhodes, and in today's episode, I'm really excited to help you craft the most amazing Instagram bio so that you can attract the right audience and grow your account. So some of the things we're going to go over today, how to write bio that actually converts and gets people to press that follow button, keywords you should be using to attract those conversions, what kind of contact info you should be sharing, your link in bio and so much more. So by the end of this episode, you should be able to log into Instagram, beef up that bio and make yourself proud so that you can magnetize new followers. All right, so before we get into today's episode, I have a little request, I guess I want to ask you guys. Homework maybe? But if you are listening right now, the best and easiest way for you to show support to call her creator and to me is to go download my podcast. So pause this episode. Go download the podcast. Download this episode. What happens is when you download my podcast at Equals success for me, that shows that you guys are listening and it will help me to continue to provide free, valuable social media marketing tips. It's one of the best ways that you can support me and call her creator. So please go download. Hey friend, welcome back to Call Her Creator, powered by your all in One Creator Store. Stan. Stan is the easiest way for you to make money online. All of your courses, digital products and bookings are hosted within your link in bio. If you're ready to start your free trial, visit my show notes and click my affiliate link to get started today. All right, all right, all right. So social media of the week. I always give you guys a little tip that I see or a feature or update, and today's update is kind of meh, but I wanted to share it anyways because it's out there. People are already able to test this new feature if it really does come to fruition. But Instagram is experimenting with audience feedback for unpublished reels clips. Silly, right? I told you. So, according to Social Media Today, Instagram's trying out some new options to enable creators to get feedback on their reels clips before they post them to the public. So basically what happens is this little pop up comes up if you've got some drafts in your. Some reels in your drafts and it says send to friends to get their thoughts before you post. No one can comment on or share your review. A draft will also be saved that you can access anytime. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Instagram? Why? Like, we're begging you for more engagement. We're begging you to recommend our profile, give us more likes and views, and you want to give us this feature that allows us to send a reels draft to friends or family. The reason I think this is so silly is because I like, I'm thinking of, like, what friends would I even send my drafts to? I guess now that I'm thinking about this, guys, okay, I just had an epiphany because truly, when I wrote the script for today, I was thinking in my head, this is so dumb. None of my friends are going to want to review my reel. Also, that's not what they do for a living. That's not their expertise. So why would I even ask them for their feedback? No offense, guys, but now that I'm thinking about this, as a social media agency owner, if. Or maybe you're. Maybe you're just like a social media manager. Maybe you do freelance content creation. Maybe you're ugc. Maybe the light at the tunnel for all of this could be that you send it to them to approve before you post it. So now my thoughts on this have completely changed. And it's crazy because I'm live now, I'm on the air, I'm on video. And I didn't know I would change my mind in the middle of all this, but this actually could be game changing for us content creators. So I'm sorry, Instagram, for being mean to you and talking crap about this update. I actually can see the value in it and I hope it actually does come to fruition because this is an update that us social media managers and content creators can use. Absolutely. So, yeah, I hope this one comes to true life. But we'll see. It's in the testing phase right now. Some people have submitted screenshots of them utilizing it. I don't have the feature right now, but maybe if you guys do, if you want to send a screenshot to me over in Social Marketing Queen or call her creator's Instagram account, I'd love to take a look at it. I'll share it to my stories to show other people what it looks like. But wow, I. I changed my mind. You go Instagram. You go Glen Coco. All right, let's get into today's main event, which is optimizing that profile of yours so we can attract the right followers and we can make more money. At the end of the day, I want you to look at Instagram as a tool for your business. So we're going to talk about profile optimization. I'm going to help you optimize your profile for Instagram search using keywords. Then we'll talk about crafting your bio. I'm going to teach you how to craft an engaging bio that converts visits to followers. And then we'll talk about story highlights and why they're so important and what you can save to your story highlights to help you build your business. So why do we want an optimized profile? The reason is that it helps you attract good fit followers. You'll build an audience that is more engaged with your content. So this is one of the biggest reasons why we don't want you buying bot followers. This is a big reason why sometimes going viral isn't always the best thing for your account. Because when you get this influx of followers that aren't interested in you or your product or your content, then what's going to happen is you're going to start posting content and there's, you're not going to get any engagement. And when that happens, the algorithm says, hmm, so and so is not really posting good quality, engaging content. I'm going to stop serving their posts to more and more people. We're just, we're just going to slowly stop showing their posts off. And then you get stuck with this account that's just not moving, not growing. Your engagement is at a all time low. This is why it's so important to attract followers that are interested in what you have to say and they are more inclined to engage with your content. So my goal today is to help you optimize your profile so that you can attract the right audience. So there's six key factors when it comes to optimizing your profile. There's your profile picture, your username, your page name, your bio, your link in bio, and then your story highlights. 6. So first let's start with your profile picture. If you are the face of the brand, I want to see a photo of you. I want a high quality photo or a professional headshot. And if you're really feeling froggy with it and you have the time, you here's something that you can do to help your profile stand out. You know when you're like on Instagram on the feed and you can see story highlights at the top. Have you ever seen those people that have like bright backgrounds in their photo? That is a strategic move on their part. They took their photo, put it into Canva or Photoshop, removed the background and then they added a bright color to make their profile pop. I suggest trying it out if you haven't, I've tried it out. I had read in the background of my profile for a little bit, but it was just kind of sore on my eyes. So I ended up switching it back to just the original headshot that I had. Because my background is on brand, it's gold. So I left mine as is. But this is something for you to definitely try out. If you want to see if it helps your profile stand out more, maybe even help you get more story views too. Then we have your username. That's going to be your Instagram handle. My Instagram handle, social marketing Queen, I actually like as much as Queen, like cringes me out now. I really do think it's helpful for my brand and my, like, getting served in the search results because I've got social in there, I've got marketing, and both of those are keywords when it comes to my industry, social media marketing. So when you're coming up with your username, try to find a way to throw a keyword in there if you can. Don't make it too long. But like Realtor Rhodes, that's a Realtor Coach Stacy or therapist Kelly, sit with Kelly is someone that I reviewed earlier. Her profile. I was talking about why I liked it and things that I liked. I'll talk about it with you guys too. But what I'm getting at is to find a keyword, like a simple keyword that you could place in your username. If it fits, Instagram can actually index your page name. What that means is when someone searches a key phrase or a keyword, Instagram looks through all the profile names and the page names on Instagram and tries to serve up the right one for you. So you gotta kind of think about your audience here. One big mistake that I see people making is that they wanna put industry jargon in their page name. Now that what I mean by that is like words that you guys use in your industry that maybe the normal person wouldn't know. So, like, if you've got all these certifications, like, I'm thinking of a nurse, I think they have something like bsn, rn, just those little, like abbreviations. If you put those in your page name, it's great to show off your expertise, but at the end of the day, I'm probably not searching for those. I'm probably searching like NICU nurse or something like a specific nurse. Now what you can do is I still want you to use those maybe in your bio to serve as experience or like an accolade so that I Know that you know what you're doing. But when it comes to your page name, so stick to your audience, put your head in your audience's head, and if you don't know what to put there, you can always go over to Google, type in your professional title and kind of see what pops up as far as what other people are searching on Google. Or you could even go over to Instagram and search that up in there and see what kind of pages pop up for that word. So if you're a mental health coach, go type mental health coach. Once you've got your page name, then it's your bio. Your bio is 150 characters long, so you've gotta keep it short and sweet. Now, some tips here for you. The way that you can break it down is first and foremost, break it down by lines. So it's easy to read and use a little emoji. So I like to break it down by like, what you do, how you help, why should they follow you? And then maybe experience an accolade, an award that you won. Something like that. So for example, my Instagram on call her creator. I think it's probably the perfect example for you guys. Says, call her creator podcast, turn your passion into a profit powerhouse. Next line says, tips to make six figures with social media. So I'm making it very clear what I'm giving for creators and aspiring entrepreneurs. I'm being very clear of who I serve. And then I cross post back to social marketing Queen. So I say host social marketing queen. That also shows off my experience too, because if people click on social marketing queen, they'll see I have a pretty large following over there. So they might say like, oh, she knows what she's doing. Now there's some other people. Let's see, we got pretty little marketer. Let's go to her page. Making social media simple strategy, social media marketing, insights, events, resources and community membership. Join the insiders club. And then she points to her link in bio. Now the one I was telling you guys about earlier. Sit with Kelly. I really liked her profile. Okay, so Kelly says her name. Kelly McKenna, anxiety therapist. An anxious human. That's her page name. I love that because she's put in there. It's clear to me. Anxiety therapist. That's what she wants to be found for. And then her bio says there's four lines here. Line number one, helping anxious overachievers like me. Line number two, dog, mom, travel and silliness. Line number three, helping therapist. And then she tags her business. And then line number Four, she tags her location and she gives her email. Now, if I was suggesting anything to her right now, as a social media manager, I would probably push dog mom travel and silliness to the bottom, because that's kind of irrelevant to my audience. But at the same time, maybe she's trying to connect with dog moms and that's important to her. So she put it up there at the top. I'm gonna just search for another person. I typed in nutrition, and I got Dietitian with twins is the username. So her page name is her first and last name. And then it says Dietitian. And then she says creator of the 903050 method. And then it says helping 2000 members transform their metabolism and relationship with food in weeks. And then from there, she has a call to action to visit her stand store. So I like that. I think it kind of tells who she is, how she's helped, which has also shown me she's an expert. Cause she's working with over 2000 people. And then. Oh, Summer reset. Now enrolling. Let me go click to that so I know exactly what she has to offer. All right, I'm going to give us one more. Let's look at my therapist, Kelly. Oh, I like hers. Okay, shout out to my therapist, Kelly, because she's left me a review on the podcast. Maybe you could be more like her and go leave me a review too, if you haven't. Okay, Kelly. And then her last name. Licensed therapist. Anxiety. So we know she's an anxiety therapist. Then she tags her location. San Diego. I'm sure she has a brick and mortar. Yeah, she does, because she also put her address at the bottom. San Diego Child Teen family therapist. We know exactly who she serves. Anxious human Helping other anxious humans. Love that. Owner of Lajala Therapy Center. So she tags her business. I love everything about her bio. It's perfect. One thing I'll note here, too. When you're editing your profile, at the bottom of that page, it says profile information. And from there you can connect your business Facebook page to your Instagram page. If you want to do any scheduling or anything like that, make it easier on yourself to post. And it also has a button down there that says contact options. And it looks like Kelly is using that because we've got her address, which Instagram has hyperlinked. And if I click on that, it actually opens it up in maps for me and tells me exactly where she is located. So I think that's pretty cool. Along with that, I've got her hours of operation, her price range, her website, her phone number, all that. So I think that's super helpful if you, if you have like a, a location to go to. I don't. So I keep my contact options off because I rather people click on my stand store and go to my website. Now speaking of website, back to the bio after you've described what you do and I'll give you two more examples when we're going through this. You then have an option to put in your website. If you don't have a website, you can use your stand store. I have both. But I use my stand store because it's so easy for people to buy from me and view all of my services versus just pushing them to my homepage of my website. I almost feel like it's like a salesy landing page versus just an informational page to push people to. So I love putting my Stan store in there. If you are new to Stan and you're a service provider or digital products or coaching or maybe even regular products, whatever, if you're trying to make money online, I have an affiliate link where you can try Stan for free for 14 days. I'll make sure that I link it in in this episode for you guys to test out if you want to try a stand store. When I changed from using a link in bio to a stand store, my revenue increased dramatically. Like there was a huge difference between me using a stand store versus a link in bio tool. So keep that in mind if you're ready to monetize your expertise. Now say you don't have a stand store, you don't have a link in bio, you don't have a website. What you can do there then is cross promote another social media channel. So whether That's Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, social media, push them to another channel of yours so you're still capturing their information. Now bonus tip here. Remember how I told you guys about when you're editing your profile, if you scroll down you'll see something that says profile info. That's where you can connect your page and choose that contact options button. But you can also choose a category for your profile. Now if you choose Entrepreneur, that unlocks all of Instagram's music library for you, which I think is pretty dang cool. A lot of people don't know about this little tip, but I feel like it's 5050 now. Some people do, some people don't. But if you're trying to jump on trending audio and you have a business page and you can't ever get that trending audio. That's your little workaround is to switch to entrepreneur category. Now the key to crafting a good bio is to do industry research first. So you can always search a keyword of your industry on Instagram and view some of the top profiles that show up. What are they typing in their bio? What can you pull from inspiration from their pages? Last two examples for you guys. I've got a financial professional and I've got a mental health coach. So the financial professional, her page name says capital V Financial professional. I help people build wealth. Credit educator, insurance agent, tools and resources. Super simple but to the point. And then we've got another woman, Women in business. I think it's Renella Mental health coach. Helping you redefine your relationship with self and others. Then the next line, build emotional resilience. Then the next line, counseling psychology. And she tags the business she works for. And then at the bottom it says get my course and pushes people to her link tree. So those are just some good examples for you guys. Do your research, get some inspiration from other accounts. Now, underneath your bio is your Instagram story highlights. Instagram story highlights appear directly under your Instagram bio and play as a standalone story when someone taps on them. They're perfect for sharing valuable information about your brand, spotlighting your community, and showing your personality. So, quick tip. Before we get into what you can do for your story highlights, I want you to know that Canva has free Instagram story highlight covers as a template for you. So if you want to really level up your branding on your profile, you can head over to Canva and type in Instagram story highlight cover. And there's a ton for you to pick and choose from. And you can customize based on your brand colors, your fonts, your services or your products, whatever it is. I personally recommend every business do that. It just really elevates your branding when I land on your profile. Now, when it comes to your story highlights, tell your story. So I've got four story highlights for you guys to utilize. If you've never made story highlights before, I'll give you some extra ideas too after them. But I think these are four core story highlights that every business or service provider should have or content creator should. So the first one is a start here or a start or intro. That's going to be you introducing and explaining who you are and who your brand is. So if I were you, I would literally just hop up on stories today. Hey guys, welcome to Social Marketing Queen. I'm Caitlin. I am a social Media agency owner. I'm a podcast host of Call Her Creator. I also have a membership and sell digital downloads that are based on social media marketing and growing your Instagram account. That's all I had to do. I just had to get my little elevator speech. Now once I post that stories, you can then save that as a story highlight to live on your profile forever. The next story highlight I have is to showcase your services or your products. So you can either do one story highlight that encompasses all of your services and products or you could even break it up by the service or the product. So for example, you could either have a story highlight that just says services or you could bring it up like coaching, digital offers, membership management, whatever it is that you have. If you're just starting out, you don't want to get too crazy with it. Just make a services tab for now and then what you'll be able to do is save any story that you've ever posted before to that story highlight so that people can learn about your services or your product. Make sure that those stories are related to your services or your product. The next story highlight is tips. This is going to be industry specific tips just to show your expertise to help people to provide value. And then the last story highlight I have for you guys is testimonials. I do think that they're still very important to show off reviews, testimonials. They don't always get the best engagement, but they're there for someone that is looking to work with you but just hasn't pulled the trigger yet. They're going to see that testimonial of that review and they're going to be like oh my gosh, she helped her. Oh my gosh, he helped him. Maybe I should work with her. So leave those reviews and those testimonials on your story highlights for people to refer back to if you if they're trying to make the decision to work with you. All right, So I have 10 story highlights for you to use to help tell your story and sell your services or your products. Meet the team, your story, blog post, saved lives. Awards, events, we give back. Maybe you want to help the community. Tips and tricks, recommendations, maybe you recommend certain tools or something like that and then you can link them inside of there and then how tos all of these story highlights are great for you to share your expertise to help people decide if they want to follow you or not. And it's just valuable to save there on your profile for people to refer back to. If you are still wondering what kind of story highlights you can save on your own profile, and you feel like you're in a specific industry, that maybe my examples didn't work very well for you. You can always go look at your competitors, kind of get a feel for what's out there already. You might get some inspiration from them on what you could save there for your story highlights. All right, so I just kind of want to go over what my story highlights are and how they perform. So the first story highlight is a start here, and that's just me talking into the camera, explaining who I am, how I got started, and how they can work with me. Super simple, easy to do, because you obviously know what you do. Then the next one is the club, which is my membership. I want to promote my club, influence what we have to offer in there. I've got screenshots of testimonials from people that are members in my membership to show, like, hey, we know what we're doing. It works. Then I've got a links story highlight, which links some of my top tech tools, or maybe it's clothing that I'm wearing that I want to share with my followers. Then I've got how I Help, which is basically my services, but I just kind of wrote it in a. A way that's more. Helps me connect better with my audience. If I click on the how I Help, I'm in there telling them what services I offer, and I break them down and I explain each of those services. Then I've got Q and A. When I first started posting to Instagram in my earlier days, I did Q and A's, like, every Friday. And there was a lot of really good questions in there. So I ended up saving them as a story highlight for people to refer back to on my page. And then I've got testimonials in there. So anytime someone sends me an email or writes us a review on Google, I always try to screenshot share it to my stories, and then I save it to my story highlights. All right, so I want to close today's episode out with a quote that I read that was really inspiring to me. I. I've known this quote for forever. I just said it to my mom the other day in a text message, and my husband's like, wow, I really like that quote. So I was like, okay, maybe I'll share it with my friends on call her creator. So it says, if you don't like where you are, move. You are not a tree. And we have to remember, guys, we are not a tree. So if you are stuck, if you're feeling stuck, you feel like you got roots stuck, you're not a tree. You don't have roots stuck. If you are in a 9 to 5 and you wake up just with a stomach ache because you're just not happy where you're at, you are allowed to choose to move somewhere else, do something else. At the end of the day, we are all in charge of our own destiny. And so if you choose to just stay in that spot day after day and you're still complaining about how miserable you are, it's on you that you're not making the change. Because we all have the power to change our path, to change our day to day, to change our relationships, to change our business. You are up to you. So I hope that quote inspires you. I hope it sticks with you. It's something that I think about all the time. Whenever I'm feeling unhappy with something, I'm like, okay, just move. You're not a tree. Just move. So I hope this episode helps you guys. I hope you go optimize your profile right now. Don't forget to download this podcast, and I'll see y' all next week. Thank you.