Instagram Guides 101: How To Master The New Feature

Instagram Guides is one of the latest new features on Instagram that businesses can use to promote their products and services. Instagram continually introduces innovative features to enhance user experience and facilitate digital marketing. Understanding how Instagram Guides work can provide businesses and marketers with the up-to-date knowledge they need to identify new ways to sell their products and services. 

Instagram Guides: The Latest Feature on Instagram

In this blog, we’ll take you through what Instagram Guides are, how to set up an Instagram Guide, and how you can utilise this new feature to effectively promote your products and services.

What are Instagram Guides?

Instagram Guides are a group of posts that are collated together to help provide the user with guided information about a certain topic or aspect of the business. In essence, Instagram Guides are a way for businesses to categorise several posts to help the user discover content based on a particular topic, product, or service that they want to learn more about.

When a business wants to save and categorise their Instagram Stories, they can create highlights to guide the user towards content that will appeal to their interests and needs. Similarly, Instagram Guides allow businesses to group posts so that the user can discover posts related to certain topics or products. This is incredibly useful as it means that users can discover content that they want to consume while saving them time scrolling through your grid posts to identify content. To enhance the visibility and engagement of your guides, you can consider buying Instagram story views, ensuring more users see and engage with your valuable content.

Overall, Instagram Guides allow users to create more in-depth shareable and discoverable content in a straightforward, user-friendly format. From product recommendations and tips to educational resources, Instagram Guides provide a fresh, immersive approach to content presentation on Instagram. Therefore, it is Instagram’s version of a digital blog or guide filled with relevant posts and content that will appeal to social media users!

How To Create an Instagram Guide

Now that we’ve learned what Instagram Guides are, let’s break down how to set up Guides:

1. To get started, go to your Profile on Instagram and click on the plus symbol at the top-right-hand corner.
2. At this stage, you should see all of the content creation options available on Instagram. Select ‘Guide’.
3. Next, a prompt will appear asking if you want to include Places, Products, or Posts in your Guide:
   1. The Places option will allow you to recommend places in your city to social media users.
   2. The Products option allows you to recommend your favourite products. 
   3. The Posts option allows you to include posts that you have created in your Guide as well as posts created by other accounts that you have saved.
   4. Select the most relevant option for your Guide and choose the places, products, or posts that you want to add to your Guide.
4. Once these have been selected, you then can rearrange the order of your posts in your Guide, add a title to your Guide, and select a cover photo.
5. You can also add titles and descriptions to each of your posts in the Instagram Guide to give your audience a bit of background into what each post offers to the user. 
6. Once you’re happy with your Guide, click on ‘Next’.
7. Finally, select ‘Share’ when you’re ready to post your Instagram Guide. You can also select ‘Save as draft’ if you need to continue editing your Guide at a later stage.

Once you have posted your Instagram Guide, you will be able to see a ‘Guides’ filter on your profile that users can click into to view all of your Guides.

How To Utilise Instagram Guides For Business

Instagram Guides are an excellent feature on Instagram to collate your posts together and offer your followers and customers guidance on your products and services. 

So, what are some of the best ways to utilise Instagram Guides for business? Here are some recommendations when putting together your Instagram Guides:

• Create Guides based on product types: Outline the different types of products or services that you offer and create an Instagram Guide for each one. This will help the consumer when they want to discover more information about a particular product or service.
• Create a Guide for your brand awareness content: A great way to promote your brand awareness is by creating a Guide that includes posts explaining who you are as a brand. For example, this could be introduction posts, behind-the-scenes content, or a ‘Meet The Team’ series.
• Create a Guide for FAQs: If you have posts created that answers some frequently asked questions that you often get asked by customers, group these together in a Guide. This will help your target audience discover important information that they need to know and saves them time scrolling through all of your posts on your main grid.
• Share your Instagram Guide to your Stories: When you click into your Guide once it’s created, there will be a Share icon at the bottom of your screen. This allows you to share your Guide as an Instagram Story. This is a great way to bring your followers’ attention to your new engaging and shareable content!

Want to learn more about how you can utilise Instagram Guides for business? Get in touch with ProfileTree today to develop your digital strategy!