Alright, welcome to the final video of module 1 we are going to complete all of those final steps to get your Instagram account set up for Success. So whether you're starting a brand new Instagram account, these are the checkboxes that you're going to want to tick or tenses. Are you already have an Instagram account? You might want to check back in and make sure that you've got these things set up correctly. Okay. So let's talk through them.

These are the seven most important parts of making sure that your Instagram profile like your actual account and the Instagram app is set up properly for growth and for security. Okay. So let's talk first about your username. Obviously when you first create a new Instagram account, you're gonna need to create a username. It's essential that you make this username match if at all possible with any existing branding that you have so if you already have a website if you already have a business name if you already have a YouTube channel, you really want to make sure that if possible your Instagram username can match any other online presence that you already have. So that if you have any traffic sent to your Instagram from these various other places online that people are able to find you. For example, I've been using my van Life channel as an example throughout this course so far when I created an Instagram to go with my YouTube channel for Katie and Dan in a van. I made the username Katie and Dan in a van. It's the exact same words. So that means if somebody watches me on YouTube they can search for me on Instagram and find me right away. If your name is not available, which does happen. Sometimes then you can get a little creative you can maybe throw and underscore or a period between your first name and last name or if you're really starting from scratch and you don't have this brand like existing elsewhere online. If you can't get the Instagram username, then you might want to consider switching it up and doing something different.

Okay. Now let's talk about your display name which is different than your username. So on your Instagram profile, you've got your like at username and then you also have your name which you can Change it can be separate from your username. So depending on your strategy you can do this differently for me. My just says Katie Steckly because I think primarily that's how people are searching for me if they've come from YouTube. But of course you can also add in more keywords to help people find you. So for me I could make mine Katie Steckly and then have one of those little bars in between and then add social media coach or something if that like fully described what I did so you can think about including your title in your display name so that you show up in search. For example, I kind of did this on the Katie and Dan in a Van Instagram it says Katie and Dan and then I threw in a little van emoji and then it says van Life Canada so that way if people are looking for Canadian vanlifers that will be able to find us by searching the next decision you need to make about your profile is whether to be a personal Creator or business account.

My recommendation for you is that you choose business account now, I know a lot of people People are drawn to the Creator option, but my personal preference is for business account because you'll be able to Auto publish your post by scheduling them, which is really nice and you'll get access to more detailed Analytics. Now I know a reason why a lot of people choose the Creator account is because for some of us if you choose business you might not be able to access the full music library for creating your reels and creating your stories now depending on the strategy that you're taking with your content that might be a really big priority to you. And if it is that it might be worthwhile choosing the Creator account essentially, you need to choose between business account less music, but you're able to Auto publish posts or Creator account more music, but you need to post everything manually. So it kind of depends on your schedule the type of content you're making you can decide what your priorities are somehow. I've magically struck gold and I get the benefits of both because I actually have a business account on Instagram, but somehow I am still able to access the full music library. So that might be the case for you too. I would recommend try out the business account see what music you can access and if it happens to be lucky like And then stick with business, but if you are going to make reals a pretty strong part of your content strategy, it might be worthwhile having the Creator account the next box to check off on this Instagram setup list is setting up two-factor authentication.

If you haven't already literally pause this video right now pick up your phone and turn on to factor authentication on your Instagram account. This is critical in protecting yourself and your business and your brand and any audience that you've built on Instagram because the last thing you want is for someone to be able to hack into your account and either delete it or like start posting stuff that you don't want to be posted. They might even be able to change your password on you. So you really want to set up that two-factor authentication and essentially what that means is anytime you log into Instagram, you'll get a text with a code to your phone number and you'll need to use that code to log in which means that whoever wants to log into your Instagram account is going to have to get Code that is sent to your phone number. So just makes everything more secure. I've linked to step by step instructions on how to set up two-factor authentication on this course page. So make sure you check that out.

Okay, the next step is optimizing your bio the bio of your Instagram account is like your elevator pitch. This is your one moment to give someone a brief overview of what you do and what value you're able to provide them going back to my Katie and Dan in a van example for my bio over there. I've written we're road trip lovers and travel enthusiasts who converted a van during lockdown and now we're traveling the USA in our home on Wheels van G. So the description says it all it shows our interests. It shows the content that you can expect. So try to figure out how you can give your potential future followers a little taste of what your content is about and you might even want to include a little call to action to the link in your bio which brings us to the next item on our checklist, which is setting up the link in your bio. This is honestly just as important as your bio, this is kind of your one big To be able to direct traffic away from Instagram and onto the other content that you have online.

There are a couple different ways you can approach this. You can either create a link in BIO menu using a service like linktree or links links is my personal favorite or if you've got one really specific place that you want to send people to then you can just add in a straightforward link on my Katie Steckly profile. I have a links menu that includes the different digital products that I have on offer. I've got a place to include a link if I'm doing any like sponsored content for a brand and then of course links to like my podcast my YouTube channel and my van Life channel over on the Katie and Dan in a Van Instagram. I've taken a different approach and I just have a single link to our YouTube channel because right now with that brand that is pretty much my one goal. Just growing the YouTube channel sending people there. So I just have a link directly to our channel. So depending on your goals, you can take either approach next up.

Let's talk about Highlights. Highlights are another opportunity on your profile to Share more content of what you create and what you're about especially to potential future followers. So if someone lands on your page and you've got some enticing titles and thumbnails of your highlights, then potential new followers might tap through to learn more about the kind of content that you create if you can it's a really great to try to keep these highlights up to date. I know a lot of us are guilty of having lots of old content in there and that's okay if they're in you know past highlights, you have to kind of scroll horizontally to find those older bubbles. That's fine. But try to have some up-to-date highlights that really display your current content the kind of stories that you make so when somebody's considering following you they can see examples of your work before they make that decision. It also can give somebody a snapshot of your content pillars. So if you have your highlights labeled by the types of different content that you provide then a potential new follower lands on your profile and they can really quickly see what kind of content they can expect from you literally from just the titles of your high.

Of course to have content in your highlights. You need to have posted to your story. So if you're starting a brand new Instagram don't stress about it too much but it might be worthwhile creating a story that introduces you what your profile is going to be about and then you can save that as a highlight to your profile and then just keep working on building up your highlights over time.

Finally. Let's talk about the feed. This is the last stop on someone scroll Journey when they arrive on your profile from maybe like clicking on your username from seeing your content on the explore page or tapping on your profile picture after coming across one of your reels. This is the last thing they're gonna check before deciding whether to keep following you we're gonna talk a lot about the content that you're gonna make for Instagram later on in this course, but just in general you want to make sure that your feed is cohesive and on brand but you don't want to stress too much about having like a magazine. Perfect Grid in reality when people are deciding to follow you it's kind of the one time they're gonna see your grid and after that they're gonna experience your content. In the feed and the way that they're even going to see your Grid in the first place is probably coming across content of yours in their feed, right. So the primary concern when it comes to creating your feed content should be how does it appear on the home feed? How does it appear in the explore feed? And what does it look like when you scroll across it in the real speed because that's the primary place people are going to engage with your content. So don't stress too much about making your grid look perfect. But you do want your grid to be representative of the content that you make in the quality of content that people can expect from you.

Of course, we're going to be talking more about how you can create this high quality content later on in the course, but for now it's time to go on to our next adventure. So travel on over to module 2 where we're gonna learn all about developing your content strategy and content creation systems. I'll see you there.