The improved Boussinesq equation is studied in this paper. Control properties for this equation posed on a bounded interval are first considered. When the control acts through the Dirichlet boundary condition the linearized system is proved to be approximately but not spectrally controllable. In a second part, the equation is posed on the one-dimensional torus and distributed moving controls are considered. Under some condition on the velocity to which the control moves, exact controllability results for both linear and nonlinear improved Boussinesq equations are obtained applying the moment method and a fixed point argument.