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Why you should have separate personal and business/blog Instagram accounts

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If you missed Social Media 101, My Background or Why Bloggers Need Snapchat check those out.   I went over some basics but needed more room to answer this question. People always ask if they can just use their personal instagram account for their business or blog and if they really need a separate account.  This goes for all social media platforms.

The answer to this is yes.  Yes, you need your own blog/business instagram + social media accounts.  BUT, only if you want to be taken seriously.
 

One thing I hate is when I go to a business page and I see personal pictures and quotes and basically social media garbage cluttering up the page.  Pictures that have nothing to do with your blog or business.  Unless your blog/business is all about your friends and family (mom blogs excluded) there is no reason to be posting your family photo album.  If you’re trying to sell me something, post pictures of products or promote your blog posts with relevant images.  Not what you did last weekend.  The only exception here is if the photo is on brand and matches your visual voice.  If not, save that photo for your friends that follow your personal social media accounts.

I’ve had a blog for awhile but in the beginning I didn’t promote it.  I really didn’t tell anyone I had a blog so I kept my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages all personal accounts and maybe mentioned the blog 1 or 2 times during the year.  Big whoop.  Guess what that did.  Nothing.  Guess who I reached. No one.  Since then, I’ve rebranded and made separate social media accounts for my blog my social media following has gone up from 1,000 to over 150,000 (including all social media) and growing daily!  Not everyone wants to follow Ady and all that is Ady haha but people do want to read what we write about and they are interested in the blog, so they will follow Verbal Gold Blog.  Our page hits have increased from 200/day to 400/day to 1000/day to 12,000 on some posts and growing!

 

This goes along with the Social Media 101 post I did earlier this week but your social media accounts need to represent your blog/business not you and your personal life.  Obviously the mommy and fashion related blogs have waaaayyyy more leeway here to post about themselves and family but still keep it blog/business related and on brand.  The fashion bloggers do a great job of this.  They aren’t posting about a night out with friends, they are showing off their outfit in a professional picture that directly relates to the blog post on where to find those pieces.  See what I mean?  Does that make sense?

In my opinion, personal business pages just scream unprofessional. Plus, I don’t know you, so I can’t relate.  If I liked your blog posts or your business products I would totally hit the follow button though. So keep your images professional and on brand.  A few questions to keep in mind when building your brand on social media: “Why would someone follow me?” and “Why do I follow other blogs/businesses?”  If you wouldn’t even follow you then you need to re-evaluate your social media strategy.  When it comes to the images, separate yourself from the business/blog accounts.  Trust me.  You’ll thank me later.  Now, don’t get me wrong, you can totally insert your personality into the captions of each posts but keep the images on brand and save the personal posts for your personal account.




My personal Instagram is @adyrol and my blog Insta is @verbalgoldblog. I keep them separate. On my personal page I post memes, gifs, stupid snapchat videos, VGB rejects aka the pictures that didn’t make the VGB IG, and anything I want! I don’t follow any rules or any brand guidelines. I don’t plan out my grid. I rarely use hashtags and I basically do everything wrong but that’s because I can. I don’t care who follows my personal page. It’s a totally different vibe, as they should be.

If you just skimmed to the bottom, the key takeaway here is keep that shit separate.

I hope this helped answer some questions but as always drop a line below if you have any other questions!  I would love to know your thoughts!