How Instagram’s New Professional Dashboard Can Help Boost Your Small Business
By: Cori Widen, Product Marketing Lead at Boosted by Lightricks
Have you heard about the new Instagram Professional Dashboard? If not, don’t worry! We’ve put together a complete guide for business owners with everything you’ll need to know about the new Professional Dashboard.
We’ve broken it down to help you understand exactly what Instagram’s new Professional Dashboard is. We’ve even provided you with 4 key strategies for how to use the Dashboard to help your business succeed on Instagram.
So, What is the New Instagram Professional Dashboard?
Instagram recently announced the launch of their Professional Dashboard to provide creators and businesses with a central hub to access all of the key tools and features that Instagram offers. The new Instagram Professional Dashboard consolidates all of Instagram’s current tools and resources to make it easier for you to track and monitor your performance and set up professional tools, like ads and shopping features. The new Professional Dashboard even makes it easier for you to explore educational content curated by Instagram to help your business succeed on the platform.
The New Professional Dashboard Offers 3 Key Sections:
1. Track Your Performance – This section is where all of your analytics are housed, making it much easier to monitor your business’ performance on Instagram. This section provides a high-level look into your business’ account performance. Here you can check out data about your audience and stats on your posts’ engagement and reach stats. This is also where you will be able to easily access your full Insights section from now on.
2. Grow Your Business – The Grow Your Business is a key section providing easy access to all of the tools users need to manage and monetize an Instagram account. This is where users can check out and set up features like Badges, Branded Content and IGTV promotions. Instagram creators and influencers can check their accounts’ eligibility for monetization and business owners can manage key features like Shopping and Ads here.
3. Stay Informed – And finally, the last section of Instagram’s new Professional Dashboard is the Stay Informed tab, which provides users with access to all of Instagram’s educational resources to help you get inspired and learn all of the Instagram tips and tricks curated into one place.
While this new Professional Dashboard doesn’t offer any new analytics or features at the moment, this new tool makes it significantly easier for businesses and creators to find and access all of their insights and tools now that it’s consolidated into one central location within the platform.
How Can Businesses Use Instagram’s Professional Dashboard to Succeed?
Like we mentioned, all of these features have already been available on Instagram, but the new Professional Dashboard brings them all together into one spot which makes it much easier for you to find and access all of these great tools and resources to stay on top of your business’ Instagram account. Here are 4 ways your business can leverage the Dashboard to succeed on Instagram:
1. Monitor Engagement – One of the most important things your business can do to succeed on the platform is to monitor the engagement on all of your posts. In order to do this, tap into the ‘See All Insights’ tab to see all of the metrics and performance of all your recent posts. The ‘Content You Shared’ section provides a breakdown of your recent posts (for both feed and Stories). Monitoring your performance metrics will help you know exactly which posts are generating the most engagement. And then you can continue creating the types of content your customers love seeing and engaging with!
2. Learn Tips & Tricks – The ‘Stay Informed’ section of Instagram’s new professional dashboard is such an amazing resource for anyone to learn more about how to succeed on Instagram. Be sure to check out this section on a regular basis to learn how to make the most of Instagram! Not only has Instagram curated tons of educational resources to help guide and inspire you, but there’s also plenty of tips and tricks to help you best utilize all of Instagram’s features and tools.
3. Track Ad Performance – As a business on Instagram, you’ve likely run Instagram ads. Whether you like to do a few small ad campaigns a year or have several big budget Instagram ad campaigns running, it’s imperative to constantly track the performance of your Instagram ads. Within the ‘Grow Your Business’ section, it’s much easier now to quickly access your ad campaigns and check in on their performance. In order to boost your business with Instagram ads, you will want to ensure you’re only keeping the most effective ads live.
4. Enable Shopping – If you are a product-based business you will definitely want to take advantage of Instagram Shopping! Instagram Shopping allows businesses to create a shop on Facebook which enables your customers to buy your products directly on Instagram! How? Head into the Instagram Shopping tab to add all of your products to your Instagram/Facebook shop. Then, whenever you post a photo of your products within the feed or Stories, you can tag the products to create a shoppable post!
We hope this guide made it easy for you to understand exactly what Instagram’s new Professional Dashboard is and more importantly, how you can use it to succeed on Instagram and boost your business! Check out more of our recent blog posts here to learn even more tips and tricks to help your business grow on social media!
Cori Widen is the Product Marketing Lead at Boosted by Lightricks. She has been leading product marketing campaigns and doing qualitative market research in the tech industry for 10 years.
