Instagram Guides: The ULTIMATE Guide
If you’ve logged into any of your social media accounts in the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that so many platforms are rolling out new ways to share your content! Between TikTok’s new effects and features, the rise of Facebook stories, and Instagram reels, there are just so many creative ways to consume content and to learn and engage with an audience.
One of the newest, most exciting additions to the social media game: Instagram Guides! They’re a great way to make curated, targeted content— and to bring a little more written content to an otherwise entirely visual platform.
What’s an Instagram Guide? 🤔
An Instagram Guide is a long-form writing piece that you can feature on Instagram! It falls under three categories:
Places, where you can recommend places in your city and beyond. This is great for featuring local businesses, photoshoot locations, tourist destinations, and so forth!
Products, where you can recommend products. These can be your own products or a curated collection of faves, dupes, or wishlists!
Posts, where you can recommend posts you created or saved. This is great for providing step-by-step breakdowns of tutorials, sharing processes, and generally just adding more info to the otherwise visual post or video!
Instagram Guides were designed to allow your community and audience to ingest a different form of media from you! They are very similar to blog posts, but have the added benefit of being in-app! You can share resources, tutorials, or just general things that are your fave! Guides are a great way to communicate information that you know your audience will want to continually come back to.
Why use Instagram Guides? 🤔
Instagram Guides are a great way to explore a different medium or form of storytelling! For a lot of creators, this is an amazing way to branch out to new content and stories while still keeping your same audience! Plus, Instagram Guides can be shared to stories and DMs, meaning that you’re not accidentally excluding any of your followers by switching over to a new platform.
Most importantly, Guides can be based on your previously posted content! Rather than coming up with new ideas every single time, you can recycle and repackage content for Instagram Guides.
If you’re a little lost on how to create Instagram Guides in the first place, make sure to take a peek at our step-by-step tutorial.
Instagram Guide ideas and inspo ✨
The most exciting part of this new feature is coming up with new ways to interact with your sweet community. But it can also be hard to brainstorm ways to bring your words to life. Short on ideas? We’ve got loads for ya!
product recommendations and reviews
travel or tour guides (post-COVID, of course 😉)
step by step tutorials for DIYs and recipes. Yes, you can finally put that margarita recipe down in writing! Just know that you can’t add new visual content to your guide —it’s based on images you have already posted, so make sure to use great descriptions!
storytimes
A behind-the-scenes explanation of the process behind a popular IGTV video, photoshoot, or product
top favourites of products, foods, etc
cost breakdowns for long-term projects, DIYs, renovations, and so forth
tutorials and techniques for how to best use products —once again, new images can’t be added to your Guide, but you can always describe with words!
Searching for more inspo? Take a look at how these amazing brands and content creators are using Instagram Guides to their advantage!
If you’re interested in getting even more inspo, check out Instagram Guides on your Shop page to get a feel of what brands and creators are doing!
We’re so excited for this new medium and all that it brings to the Instagram platform and the content we can produce with it. Do you have any unique ideas on how to take advantage of Instagram Guides? Let us know in the comments below, or reach out to us over on Instagram @LifeLapse_App! You may even find an Instagram Guide or two over there 😏.
for more social media tips and tricks, head over to our blog!