First it was IGTV, next it was Reels, now its Guides.  

Instagram Guides – Instagram’s latest feature makes lives easier for businesses and social media managers by allowing you to group relevant content quickly and simply for your audiences.  

Debued in May 2020, Instagram created Guides as a tool for sharing content around wellbeing during the pandemic. The platform partnered with organisations like Heads Together and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to provide informative, helpful content for managing grief and anxiety during 2020.  

The feature now acts like a mini blog, allowing you to pull together helpful posts into one place and transform the content scattered throughout your account into a straightforward, coordinated resource for your audience.  

Divided out by three categories; places, products and posts; you can adapt your Instagram Guides to specific topics or area’s where you want to add value.   

A Step-by-step guide  

Setting up a Guide is simple and straightforward.  

1. Step one: tap the + button to add new content, then select Guide from the menu. 

2. Step two: Pick from one of the three options, depending on whether you are promoting a place, a product/ service, or a selection of your posts.  

3. Step three: You can then add content to your Guide, for example, if you are promoting a service offering for your business, you could group all the posts you created, or saved, around the offering to make it more cohesive and comprehensive.  

4. Step four: You can then add titles and descriptions for each post included within your Guide, as well as an overall title, description, and cover photo for your Guide. Once complete, you can share to your page, where it will be found under the third tab on your profile, or under the Guides icon.  

Don’t worry you can go back and edit your Guide at any point, to add/ remove content or amend wherever necessary. 

Some nice examples of how brands are utilising Instagram Guides include sooveritshop, who have created a guide to recap the months most popular sustainable brands within their area:  

Another example of an account maximising the potential of their Instagram Guides is condenasttraveller, who have created a guide to the “cheapest, nicest places in the world”, to help their audience plan any future trips with minimised expense: 

If you are thinking about creating an Instagram Guide, remember to plan ahead!  

Instead of publishing ten posts in a row for the specific purpose of creating a Guide, think about what Guides you would like to put together in the future. Then naturally build posts, relating to the topic into your Instagram content and use those posts for your upcoming Guide.   

Where previously you might have linked out to a brochure, maybe now your brochure becomes a guide instead – making it easier for your audiences to access the information they need within one platform.  

If you’d like more information on content creation or getting the most out of Instagram, contact us today by emailing info@springboardcommunications.ie