The perfect bio for your Instagram and Facebook page

Your bio is the only piece of text that every visitor reads. Your best post is seen by a fraction of your audience. Your bio is read by everyone who's deciding whether to follow you, call you, or visit you.

And yet most businesses have something like "Welcome to our page! ✨ Quality since 1998". That says nothing, to no one.

The three questions your bio needs to answer

Someone lands on your profile and has about three seconds of patience. In that time, they want to know:

What do you do? In plain words. Not a "experiential concept", just "bakery".

For whom and where? Your town or region. For a local business, this is the most important word in your entire bio, and it's almost always missing.

What should I do now? Call, reserve, visit, order. One thing.

The structure that works

Line one: what you are and where. "Artisan bakery in Lokeren."

Line two: why you. Something concrete, not an adjective. "Sourdough with a 24-hour rise." Not "the best quality".

Line three: practical. Opening hours, or the fact that you take orders.

Line four: the next step. "Order? 09 xxx xx xx" or "Reserve via the button below".

Four short lines. That's more than enough, and it reads in three seconds.

Instagram: the details that matter

Your name field is searchable, and so is your username, but your bio text is not. That means "Bakery Peeters" in your name field makes you invisible to anyone searching for "bakery Lokeren". So put it in: "Bakery Peeters | Lokeren".

Also fill in your category, link your address, and use the action button. If you run a restaurant, set it to "Reserve". If you work by appointment, "Book". That button is free and is scandalously underused.

Your story highlights are your shop window: one for your menu or prices, one for frequently asked questions, one for customer reviews. Fill those in and you'll answer ten questions without ever having to type a thing.

Facebook: it's a business page, not a profile

Facebook gives you more space, and that's a trap. Two sentences above the fold are what gets read; the rest is for those who click through.

What does need to be fully filled in: address, phone number, opening hours, category and website. Not because it looks good, but because Facebook and Google use that information to show you to people in your area. A page without opening hours gets shown less than a page with them.

And make sure your address is identical to what appears on your Google Business Profile. Literally identical, right down to how the street name is abbreviated. Different spellings make search engines uncertain about whether it's the same business.

Emoji: useful, not decorative

Use them as bullet points or to draw the eye to something practical, not as decoration. A phone icon next to your number is useful. Six stars around your slogan is noise.

Five bios that appear far too often

"Welcome to our page!" — your visitor already knows they're on your page.

"Quality, service and passion." — every competitor says that too.

"Follow us for updates!" — no reason given why.

"Since 1998." — nice, but not why someone would buy from you today.

"Link in bio 👇" — without saying where it leads.

Do this today, it takes ten minutes

Open your profile on your phone and read your bio as if you've never seen it before. Do you know within three seconds what the business does, where it's located and what you should do? No? Rewrite it using the four lines above.

It's the only text on your entire profile that everyone reads. Ten minutes is a ridiculously small price to pay for the most-read sentences your business has.