Instagram Guides: Everything You Will Ever Need to Know about them …
A few days ago on the 17th of November Instagram announced a new feature called Guide.
Initially, Instagram enabled the Guides to feature for a selected number of health and wellness organisations, influencers, and publications in an effort to provide resources for people who are struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But now, this feature is being rolled out to all users:
What are Instagram Guides?
As we all know that Instagram had also released reels in the month of august which I would say was one of the biggest and best competitive decisions which stakeholders too.
But, now they are back with a big banger know as Guides. So you might be asking what are these Guides.
So here it is
Instagram said that “They wanted to offer a way for its users to more “easily discover recommendations, tips, and other content” from their favourite creators, public figures, organizations, and publishers”.
What I understood was:-
Guides are a brand new way to share and consume content on Instagram.
They allow users to follow a curated flow of posts with commentary — which is great for step-by-step guides, tips, and recommendations.
And upon reading what Instagram had to say and by doing a bit of research I could see that Guides are really cool cause we are basically creating a blog post from the content which we have already made or content we wanna share again. So we can say that its another way of repurposing the content. And I am really excited how Instagram has adapted to a blog post format is actually mind-blowing and it only makes me imagine what they have planned for the future. And also they are just about to release the possibility to search for keywords through Instagram and not solely depending on hashtags. For an example lets say that someone has a dog in his posts and they are not using the #dog, then we would still be able to find that post using search. And as we now have Guides which are blog posts, Instagram is trying to become a better search engine and it wouldn’t be bad to say that these guides would be popping off into our search a lot.
I think that Guides have a lot of potentials.
Where do you find Instagram Guides?
Guides are located in a separate new tab on a user’s profile (look for the booklet icon between the photo grid icon and tagged photos icon). I think they’ll also start to appear in the Explore tab. Visitors to these Guides can share them across their own stories and indirect messages.
Some of the pages which I found that contain these guides are :
How do Instagram Guides work?
When viewing a Guide, you can see posts and videos that the creator has curated with their own tips, commentary, or advice and that’s not it we can even use posts from other creators by saving them onto our saved posts. This is an amazing way to credit and provide a shoutout to these amazing creators. If you want to learn more about a specific post, just tap on the image or video to view the original Instagram post. You can also share a Guide to your story by tapping on the paper plane icon.
How to Create an Instagram Guide
To create your first Guide, tap the plus icon on the top-right of your profile page and select “Guide.”
Image here
From here, you can choose from 3 different Guide formats:
- Places: Recommend places in your city and beyond
- Products: Recommend your favourite products
- Posts: Recommend posts you created or saved
Each format is designed to suit a creator’s needs. For example, post can be used to curate a defined flow of Instagram posts (that you’ve created or saved) with custom headlines and commentary.
Products can only be used to curate products available in an Instagram Shop and this point is something which triggered me cause Instagram not only being one of the best social media platforms are also trying to get into the e-commerce business, the earlier me would have been angry on it but I would like to know what are your thoughts on Instagram promoting it’s on Shop. Do let me know.
This is a great tool for brands or businesses looking to add extra context or commentary to their shoppable products on Instagram. It also opens up new opportunities for influencer partnership, as anyone (including influencers and brand ambassadors) can use this tool to curate a list of recommended products so the users who follow them can directly interact with the product.
Let's get started by creating your first Guide:-
Step 1: let’s start with going to our profile page and then selecting the plus icon on the top right corner.
Step 2: Click and select Guides in the panel
Step 3: As we mentioned above that we have 3 options to choose from
- Places: Recommend places in your city and beyond
- Products: Recommend your favourite products
- Posts: Recommend posts you created or saved
For now, lets just select Posts options,
You would be prompted with an option to select the photos and videos from Your posts, but that’s not it, you would find the Saved option on the bottom right from where you can even select images from the saved folder, but for now, let us select a few photos from your posts and hit next.
Step 4: Here we would customize our Guide
You can see that the first image which you have selected has become the Cover image, but you don’t need to worry about it you can select “Change Cover Photo “ and then choose the images from Your posts, Saved, From the guide
The main step is to add a catchy title so that people are attracted to it and a brief description of the guide.
Step 5: Adding a storyline to your images, you need to keep in mind that you can reorder and also delete a certain photo or video.
It’s necessary that you have a title assigned to it, and also remember that the video will play on its own as soon as then get over the video.
One more thing which I am happy about guides is that we don’t have a limit of photos or videos which we can use for it.
As soon as we are done with the above steps click on the Next button, it will redirect you to the new page where you can share it to people and even share it as your story (which is recommended for better reach) or you can even save it in your drafts so that you can keep working on it later on.
I would be excited to see how people utilize guides on the desktop version of Instagram
Instagram Guides create a whole new way to curate and consume content on Instagram — opening up huge opportunities for story-telling and e-commerce on the app.
What do you think of this feature?
Always ready for a chat over a coffee.
Guys I have added an easter egg of next article lets see how many of you guys can find it.
Don't forget to drop a clap and share it with other creators.
Also, don't forget to check out my new Guide on UI/UX trends to watch out in 2021
