Instagram Guides: All You Need to Know
Instagram Guides: What are they? Should I be posting them? How do I create them?
We feel Instagram Guides are one of the lesser known and underutilised features on the platform. They were released during the height of the Covid pandemic and were originally limited to health and wellness industries, but have now become more widely available.
What are Instagram Guides?
Instagram Guides are a new way to collate and share information on your Instagram profile. There are 3 types of guides that you can choose to create to suit your particular goals. These include:
- Places: Recommend places in your city and beyond
- Products: Recommend your favourite products
- Posts: Recommend posts that you created or saved
Places guides allow you to share or recommend places based on their location. Think travel guides, foodie spots or local gems.
Products guides allow you to recommend your favourite products either in your own store, or via another instagram store owner.
Posts guides allow you to curate a selection of saved posts or posts from your own feed. This is a great way to share tips, step-by-step instructions or tell stories.
These guides appear on their own tab alongside your feed, reels and tagged posts. They’re a great way to share informational content, promote your products or help your followers find curated content all in one place.
Should I be posting Instagram Guides?
We love utilising all the different features available to us on Instagram, so we say go for it! Instagram Guides are a great way to offer content in a new format other than posting, and we love that they help your followers easily find information relating to one topic.
Although at first only available to the health and wellness profiles, Instagram has been rolling this feature out across all industries so if it isn’t available to you yet, it will be very soon. You can be as creative as you like with Guides by tailoring them to your business. Check out some of these inspiring ideas:
- Breakfast, lunch and dinner recipe guides for the avid foodie
- Favourite health and beauty products from your Skin clinic
- Local hidden gems and B&B recommendations from the travel blogger
How do I create an Instagram Guide?
Instagram Guides are created directly from your profile on the Instagram app. To start creating your guide, you’ll use the ‘create’ button on your profile which gives you all the different content types including posts, stories, IGTV videos and guides.
Instagram allows you to add headings, descriptions and a cover image to your Guide. This can take some time depending on how long your guide is, so set a little time aside for this.
For a more in-depth tutorial on creating Instagram Guides, make sure to check out our Tribe Training platform!
The team here at Social Media Tribe regularly creates and uploads training videos to teach you how to get the most out of social media for your business. There is so much valuable content on this platform that has been broken up into easily digestible videos – the latest of which includes Instagram Guides.
