Once you’ve decided Facebook and Instagram are your starting point, the next question is how to set them up. This isn’t just a case of downloading the app and creating a profile. A few decisions made properly now will save a lot of rebuilding later.
Business accounts, not personal ones
Set up a Facebook Page and an Instagram business account, not personal profiles. A business or creator account unlocks insights, reach, engagement rate, audience breakdown, that you’ll need later when you’re putting a sponsorship proposal together. It also lets you add contact buttons and categorise the account properly as a racing driver rather than an individual, which matters when someone lands on your profile for the first time and needs to understand who you are within a few seconds.
Turn on parent managed account
If either driver is under 18, Instagram’s “parent managed account” setting should be switched on, part of what Meta calls its Supervision Tools for Teen Accounts. It’s a feature built specifically for this situation: a minor running a public account with a parent or guardian formally attached to it. It signals that the account has oversight, and it keeps a parent genuinely involved in what gets posted and who’s reaching out through direct messages, which becomes more important, not less, once sponsorship conversations start.
Two accounts, not one
Parent supervision on Instagram sorts out the safety side, but it doesn’t answer a separate question: whose account is this actually for?
The answer is that a junior driver needs two accounts doing two different jobs, not one account trying to do both.
The driver brand account is the public one. It carries the driver or team name, it’s the one sponsors, journalists and fellow racers find, and it’s the one that shows up in the race weekend content, the sponsor thank-yous and the press releases covered elsewhere in this guide. This account should be run day to day by a parent, or handed to us as part of a Full Digital Management retainer, not run solely by the young driver themselves. That’s not about taking control away from them, it’s about consistency. Race weekends are exhausting, school doesn’t stop for a race calendar, and a brand that goes quiet for three weeks because its young driver is mid exam season looks worse than one that never existed. A parent or an agency keeping the lights on solves that.
It also solves a safety problem that supervision alone doesn’t. The driver brand account is the one that takes DMs from strangers claiming to be sponsors, comments from anyone who’s found the page through a race result, and messages from people who aren’t who they say they are. That inbox should sit with an adult, not with the child, and having a business account run by a parent means it does by default, not as an afterthought.
The personal account is the one nobody but the young person’s own friends and family ever needs to see. Keep it private, keep it separate, and don’t try to merge it with the driver brand. It exists for exactly the same reason any teenager has a private account: to talk to mates, post the stuff that has nothing to do with racing, and not have every post filtered through whether it’s good for the sponsors. Trying to run both off one profile either makes the brand account too personal for a sponsor to take seriously, or makes the personal account too curated for the young person to actually enjoy using.
The practical setup: a business or driver account created and run under a parent’s Instagram supervision, named after the driver or team, and a personal account kept separate, private, and never used to represent the racing brand publicly. Simple to set up now, much harder to untangle in three years once the brand account has followers, history and sponsor tags attached to it.
Lock in matching handles everywhere
Try to secure the same handle across every platform you plan to use: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. If instagram.com/ontrackmarketing is available, grab facebook.com/ontrackmarketing, the TikTok handle and the YouTube one too, all before you’ve posted a single piece of content. Handles get harder to secure the longer you wait, and a small window early on can close permanently.
Matching handles do more than look tidy. They make you easier to find, easier to remember, and far more professional when a sponsor is checking you across platforms and finds the same name every time rather than three slightly different versions of it.
A quick setup checklist
- Facebook Page and Instagram business account, set up together
- Parent managed account switched on for any driver under 18
- The same handle secured across Instagram, Facebook and YouTube
- Bio and profile photo consistent across every platform from day one
Get this right before you post anything, and everything you build after it has a proper foundation to sit on.
Not sure whether your existing accounts are set up right? Our Motorsport Marketing & Media Review, £45, covers exactly this alongside branding and sponsorship readiness.
Next in this series: why your racing brand is about your personality, not your logo.
