Instagram’s Creator Account feature was initially rolled out for users with over 10,000 followers, but it is now available for anyone who would like to switch to a professional account.
According to Instagram, the Creator Account includes “features that make it easier to control your online presence, understand your growth and manage your messages.” Instagram Creator profiles are similar to Instagram Business Accounts, but they have a custom inbox, expanded growth insights, slightly different contact information, and category labels that can be toggled on or off. Basically, the Creator Account is meant specifically for content creators and influencers, with the intent of helping them track follower growth and engagement over time.
In addition to releasing Creator Accounts, Facebook has given us Creator Studio for both Facebook and Instagram. This gives creators one place to manage all of their Facebook pages and Instagram accounts, including scheduling both Facebook and Instagram posts on the computer and tracking analytics.
Today we are going to walk through how to make the switch over to an Instagram Creator Account, what you can do with Creator Studio (and why we think it’s an important step towards some of Facebook’s larger goals), as well as our big prediction for Creator Accounts that will make them an important part of influencer marketing strategies in the future.
How To Get An Instagram Creator Account
It’s easy to switch your account over to a Creator Account.
Go to your Instagram profile and tap on the three-line button in the top-right corner. Then tap the Settings gear icon at the bottom of the screen.
From the Settings menu, select the Account option:
- If you are migrating from a personal account, choose Switch to Professional Account and tap Creator.
- If you already have a business profile, choose Switch to Creator Account.
The setup process will take you through a few options screens. This is where you will select a category, and turn your contact options on or off.
You will also have the option to connect your account to a Facebook page. You can skip this if you like, but if you plan to do sponsored work as a creator, it’s important to make this connection. Without the connection, analytics platforms like CreatorIQ can’t access your metrics through the API.
That’s all you need to do!
You’ll start seeing insights and direct message features on your account immediately.
Instagram Creator Account Feature: Insights
We’ve historically seen influencers use third party data tools to access data on both the increase and decline of followers. With a Creator Account, you are able to see daily growth and loss stats.
This new growth graph can give you more insight into why your audience has shifted. By selecting a day on the Growth graph and tapping See Posts above the graph, you’ll see all of the stories and feed posts you shared on that day. You can then determine if the less popular posts in your feed led to lower engagement, or both lower engagement and loss of followers.
Over time, it will be possible to find trends in this information that can give you a better understanding of how your content is performing overall. If, for instance, you see a follower increase every time you are using a specific hashtag, you will be able to incorporate it into your strategy more frequently.
Instagram Creator Account Feature: Desktop
Analytics In addition to the analytics available for your profile in the app, you can now access your analytics on your computer using Creator Studio. As we noted above, Creator Studio is actually available for both Business and Creator Accounts.
Instagram Creator Studio: What You Need To Know
Creator Studio is essentially a desktop dashboard management tool that allows you to view all of your Instagram (and Facebook) content and insights. The information isn’t any different from what you see in the Instagram app Insights, but it does allow you to access everything on the desktop without having to use a third-party tool.
When you open Creator Studio on desktop, you can connect your Facebook profile, associated Facebook pages, and your Instagram account. Creator Studio defaults to your Facebook pages when you first log in, but you can click the Instagram icon at the top of the page to connect and view your Instagram information.
Within the Instagram Creator Studio content library, you can see all of your posts, or filter by date or type of post (video, photo, carousel, stories). You can also look for a post by keyword.
The most exciting thing about Creator Studio is that you can use it to schedule Instagram posts and IGTV videos from your computer.
From the beginning, we thought the move towards Creator Studio was part of Mark Zuckerberg’s larger plan to integrate the social network’s messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger — so that people can communicate across platforms within the company’s ecosystem. And we’ve already seen the connection between Facebook Messenger and Instagram DM’s begin rolling out this year.
Instagram Creator Account Feature: Filtered Inbox
In Instagram’s mind, a personal account is only receiving personal messages, and a business account is only receiving business messages. But an influencer would receive both types of messages, as well as a potentially higher volume of messages from followers, and that can get disorganized when all of those different kinds of messages are landing in the same place.
Personal and business Instagram accounts both have one inbox and a requests tab for potentially spam-related messages to land until you approve or reject them. With an Instagram Creator account, your inbox is broken up into three sections – primary, general, and requests. This will allow you to organize your business and personal conversations.
When you first switch your account over to a Creator Account, all of your existing messages will be placed in the primary inbox, but they can be moved.
It’s up to you which messages you want to live in general and which ones are primary, and messages can be moved back and forth as needed. You can also set your notifications for each inbox separately, so you can decide if you want to get a push notification for every message, or only the messages in a specific inbox.
Instagram Creator Account Feature: Shopability
This is the Creator Account feature we are the most excited about, because it is a feature that both influencers and brands have been wanting for a long time. Influencers will be able to tag products in their posts to make it easy for their followers to shop within the app.
This feature isn’t available to all Creator Accounts at this time. Instagram has been testing it with a select group of creators. On the brand side, businesses must be set up with Checkout on Instagram to approve creators for adding shoppable tags. We expect to see this feature rolled out more widely over time.
If you are a content creator on Instagram, we recommend switching your profile to a Creator Account. If you are a brand, looking to work with influencers, it’s an important question to include when you are vetting for potential partnerships, especially if you are going to ask them to authenticate in an analytics platform to measure the success of your influencer program.
