Set your brand apart on Instagram with Guides, an often-overlooked feature that allows your followers to easily explore curated posts, products and locations with just a glance. Get started today with 5 easy to follow steps!
Eluned Gulbekian Faram
What Are Instagram Guides?
Instagram Guides allow you to curate scrollable, interactive content – similar to a blog post – all on your Instagram profile. This works by pulling in posts (either your own or from other accounts), products or places alongside refreshed captions and information. Curate easy-to-digest content around any theme, to engage and inspire your audience.
Instagram Guides have been around for a while but they are still often overlooked by businesses. Master them and Guides will prove a great way to make your brand stand out.
When would you use Instagram guides?
For e-commerce businesses, you might want to create product guides highlighting specific collections or products that sit within the same theme. You could also do the same with a collection of posts. You might want to highlight seasonal products or the results of your business’s services. For example, if you own a retail company, you might have a guide for Summer Essentials, Christmas Gift Ideas, or posts of your customer community wearing your brand’s clothes, and so on.
When a user clicks on an individual post in a guide, it takes them back to the original post on your feed, letting you give your content a new lease of life without repeating yourself. Plus, if you’ve got content you are really proud of, guides are the perfect way to showcase it and keep your hard work evergreen!
How do they work?
You can choose from 3 different guide formats:
Places: Recommend places in your city, local service area, or beyond.
Products: Recommend favourite products from your own shop or others.
Posts: Recommend posts you’ve created or saved. Perfect for curating inspiration boards, or showcasing posts from suppliers or collaborators.
Before you start, make sure you have a clear theme for your guide. Check out a couple of examples of ways to use Guides from other brands to gather a bit of inspiration:
Big brands like Beats by Dre, Asos and even Asda all offer guides that are designed to help the user while showcasing specific products.
For small brands, approach Instagram Guides in the same way. Luxury hair accessory brand Tegen Accessories use Guides to promote product collections and gift guides. For TP Improvements, window and door specialists based in Surrey, Instagram Guides are a perfect way to offer customers inspiration through curated collections.
How To Make A Guide On Instagram:
To get started, open Instagram and go to your profile.
On the top right, click the plus sign which will take you to the ‘Create’ options – choose ‘Guide’ (if Guide is not showing up as an option, try updating the Instagram app on your phone, and note that you cannot create guides from your desktop).
You can now choose your Guide type from the 3 options, Places, Products or Posts. In this example, we’ll choose Posts which will then let you choose from your own posts on your profile, and your saved posts.
Select the images that you would like to include in your guide and click Next.
You will then be taken to your new Guide. You can change the cover photo, fill in all the text boxes with the information you want to share, and change the order that the posts appear in (to change the order of the posts click the three dots in the top right corner of each picture).
Once you’ve started creating Guides on your Instagram, they will be accessible on your profile in a tab between grid posts and tagged posts with the Guides icon (it looks like a little book).
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