How to Use Instagram Guides (NEW feature tutorial)
Have you heard about Instagram’s latest new feature, Instagram Guides?
Instagram has certainly been making a lot of changes recently, particularly regarding the layout of where to find and post things, and they’ve made the Reels area much more prominent in the app too (learn more about Reels and my best tips for using them!). But one new feature they’ve released to all accounts recently is the ability to create ‘Guides’.
What are instagram guides?
Guides are a way for you to curate and share a selection of recommended posts, products or places in a list-style mini article within the Instagram app. A ‘Guide’ features a title, cover photo, description, and a collection of posts chosen by you, with their own subtitles and descriptions if you wish too.
Initially this feature was just available for health & wellness brands but it’s now been rolled out to all accounts.
To create a Guide, head to your profile and click the ‘+’ button in the top right corner, and scroll to the bottom of the options to see ‘Guides’. When you tap this it will ask you choose which type of Guide you’d like to create.
What’s the difference between the types of guides?
As you can see, you’re given the following three options for your type of Instagram Guide:
Places: Here you curate locations (whatever is set up as a location in Instagram, so it could be a town, a street, or a specific shop/restaurant/business), using posts associated with that location to use as images in your guide. When you’ve published your Guide it creates a map as well of all of the locations you’ve tagged.
Products: You can feature any products either from your own Instagram Shop or from other accounts Instagram Shops. A great way of creating edits / collections of products, collaborating with brands or making gift guides, for example.
Posts: Choose from any posts / Reels / IGTVs that you have shared onto your grid to feature in a list, or you can use any post you have ‘saved’ on Instagram too. This can enable you to create step-by-step guides and helpful, educational content or series’ based on specific topics that you share on your grid.
Benefits of using Guides:
Guides seem like a great way of making your content more ‘evergreen’; meaning you can pull older posts or products into a Guide and therefore have a way of people seeing them again. The ability to create these lists, round-ups or curated collections allows your audience to see your content in a new way.
Things to note:
You can’t currently use real working URL links within Guides, and you can’t currently use hashtags (although that may change). Instagram have said they’re moving toward a ‘keyword’ focused search ability now so it’s important to make sure you’re using keywords you’d like to get found for in your Guide Titles and descriptions, in case the search function picks these up similar to hashtags.
There’s also currently no analytics available on Guides so you can’t see how many people have viewed them, but again this may change.
How do you create Instagram guides?
Check out my in-depth video tutorial on YouTube to see exactly how to create Instagram Guides within the app:
