Instagram is fantastic for social media marketing. Consider this:

– Instagram has 300 million active monthly users

– Instagram users have shared over 30 billion photos to date, and now share an average of 70 million photos per day

– Instagram is considered the most important social network by more American teens (at 32 percent) than any other network

It’d be silly NOT to use Instagram to promote your brand.

As many of Instagram users already know, you can’t drive traffic to different websites in the body of a post on Instagram because Instagram doesn’t make links live. The goal of this tutorial then is simple: I want to show you how to use the website link space on your Instagram profile to drive traffic to different sites without having to change the link in your profile.

Benefits of doing this:

• Branded links are more trustworthy
• Long links are unsightly
• Will allow you to use Instagram to drive traffic to new work (since links aren’t active in post descriptions)

My inspiration was @enews – I noticed that they were resourceful in how they drove people to their website from mobile devices without ever changing the branded, shortened URL in their Instagram profile.

I wanted to learn how to do that, figured it out, and now here we are!

After doing a little bit of Google digging, I realized that I was going to have to find a link shortener that would allow me to change the long URL on a published shortened link.

(I use Bit.Ly for my link shortening but found that I was going to be unable to change the long links in any of my published bit.ly short links. After digging around, I discovered that Tiny.CC was a good option for what I was trying to do.)

 

*** Before you begin: Sign up for an account with Tiny.CC ***

Step 1. Choose a link to share, any link. Preferably one that shares something you’re promoting. In this example, I’m going to share a link to a blog post I wrote titled Getting it Done: Digital Tools of the Trade

Step 2. Customize your short link. I wanted mine to link to tiny.cc/KarlaLarraga for brand recognition.

Step 3. Press “Tiny” to shorten the link

Once you’ve done this, you can set the shortened link as the website link on Instagram. You can edit your Instagram account here.

Step 4. On Instagram, select the “Edit Profile” option and copy-paste the shortened link into the Website option.

That shortened link will now drive anyone that clicks on it over to the original long link you shared. In my current example, people would be visiting the blog post I wrote titled Getting it Done: Digital Tools of the Trade.

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Now that that is set up let’s move forward. Let’s assume I write a new blog post and I want to drive traffic to that. What do I need to do?

First, before starting – Copy the new link you want to share. In this example, I’m going to share a link to a blog post I wrote titled Creating a Professional Twitter Profile Bio. Then, I need to go back to Tiny.CC and click on the Manage option on the right-hand side of the page.

Once you’re on the Manage page, do the following:

Step 1. Press the check box next to the link that you are changing.

Step 2. Press on the pencil icon to edit that link.

Step 3. Select the long link. Delete it.

Step 4. In the empty Long link space, paste the link you want to share. (In this case, Creating a Professional Twitter Profile Bio)

Step 5. Press the “update this link” button. Take care not to edit the”Tiny link” option in this form.

After this, you’re done! Once you share a new post on your Instagram page, make sure to share that your Link is in Bio, and your audience will be redirected to the new post you’re promoting.

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