What Instagram account should I have? Creator or Business
22 – What Instagram account should I have? Creator or Business
Instagram has two main types of account and the fact that you are here under a paid membership hopefully means that you are not using a personal account type and you are now using a professsional account type. The professional account type is fairly new and a lot of people dont actually realise it is exists. A professional account type has two sub account types which people will be more familiar; creator account and business account. Now that these two accounts come under the same over arching category a lot of what used to separate them no longer applies.
Both business and creator accounts now have access to the professional dashboard where you can track insights and performance, you can link Facebook pages, add full contact information with call to action buttons and have a secondary inbox. The professional dashboard has lots of features to help you grow your brand and yet some people are still confused by what account to choose and a lot of articles debating this fact seem to be out of date. So should you be using a creator account or a business account?
Lost of articles list the differences between the accounts saying you can have a shop on one but not the other and you get good insights on one but not the other but that doesnt seem to be the case anymore.
What are the main differences
The official line on this is that a creator account was designed to be used by an individual whereas a business account is designed to be used by a team but that doesnt mean you should just opt for a creator account without considering the alternative.
I keep seeing it mentioned that Business accounts do not have the ability to use music from a recording artists in their content but I am not sure if that is the case any more. If creating reels with trending music is your thing then its worth investigating further.
Both account types have the ability to create posts using the paid collaborations marker, something that is very important for advertising rules in the UK. All of your brand work whether paid or gifted should be clearly marked either using this tool or using the word AD or similar at the start of your content. It also allows you to tag brand products and allow collaborators to post your content on to their feed which can greatly increase your reach.
So basically when using the app itself I can’t really find much difference at all but there is one thing that is different and that is when it comes to using a scheduling tool.
The differences when using a scheduling tool
The Instagram API decides what the scheduling software can and can’t do and for reasons I can not understand they don’t think that creators need to be able to auto publish content.
Business account
The business account on Instagram gives scheduling tools a little bit more automation than the creator account. It allows these tools to do the following:
- auto publish single image/video posts
- auto publish carousel posts
- auto publish reels
- access analytics
- search for and collect hashtags
- tag people and locations
- collect posts you are tagged in
- manage instagram comments
- add a first comment on your auto published post
It will not allow you to auto publish stories.
Creator account
The Creator account allows scheudling tools to send push notifcations to you so that you can publish the content but it wont allow tools to auto publish for you and you wont be able to tag people or locations from your scheduler. The creator account also allows you to look at the best time to post which many schedulers can use to send you a push notifcation at the right time.
Making a decision
For me the key thing to consider would be scheduling. I do think more people see the content I post on my creator account but that could just be pure luck however the ability to schedule content in advance makes me lean towards the business account.
No matter what you choose you can always change your mind later which means that if at some point in the future you need to do something that your current account type prevents you from doing (such as auto posting whilst you are on holiday) then you can switch from a creator account to a business account
