Today, I’m going to be sharing with you all about Instagram Guides. Any of you have noticed that there have been constant updates with Instagram lately.
There’s a new interface that Instagram is heavily focusing on Reels and the Shopping feature. Reels is now right in the middle at the bottom of the page where you use to upload your posts for the feed and shopping is just right next to it.
Instagram Guides make it easier to find, curate and share the products, places and posts you love from your favourite accounts on Instagram. You can find Guides on your profile and share them across your Instagram stories and in the DMS.
So how do you locate Guides? This is a little bit tricky because you only see from one location. If you tap on your home button and want to upload a piece of content, you normally press the plus sign button and Stories, Reel and Live are only seen on the home page.
But if you hit your profile by tapping on your profile picture at the bottom right, you’ll be able to locate Guides from that area.
Once you are at your profile, just look at the top right-hand corner to see a plus sign, tap on that and there will be a drop-down menu. You can select the Guide feature that’s located right at the bottom of the list. Once done, you can choose from places, products and posts that you want to share.
If you are a service-based business, whether you’re a coach or consultant or a content creator, most likely you will be using the posts feature. More products can only be used to curate products. The Guide that you want is available in an Instagram shop and that’s more for e-commerce businesses.
For now, we’re going to focus on more of what is beneficial for service-based business owners just like you – how to use Instagram Guides for your business.
YouTube has a playlist which is curated content that is in a group. Think of it as how a YouTube playlist works. You can organise it into different guides, for example, tips, how to use or showcasing your services.
If you are a fitness coach and want to put together all your tips about getting apps, just select the content that is related to your tips on how to get apps.
Same goes for all of your how-to’s and the services that you want to showcase and share with your audiences. This is a really great way to revive your own posts. Take a look at your insights and see which posts did well and compile together the ones that had more reach, shares and saves.
This is also a good time where you can test the old posts that didn’t work well and revive them if there’s a message you would love to share. It can be a motivational and inspirational type of story that you would like to share once again.
Guides can be easily shared to Instagram Stories or in the DMS by just tapping on the paper plane icon at the top right-hand corner of the screen.
You don’t have to necessarily spend so much time on this feature unless you have the additional time. There are other features that I would say you can focus more on like Reels, as it can actually boost your reach and visibility organically and Instagram is prioritising this new feature.
Don’t appear on the Explore page and on your feed. It will be hard for people to discover what you’re sharing in your Instagram Guides unless they see your stories or you’ve shared it with them through the direct messages.
If they are looking at your profile, and they tap on the Instagram Guides tab, then only your Instagram Guides can be discovered. I would say that this feature can be used as an additional resource for your audience for now.
If Instagram decides to update this feature in the future where you’ll be able to see on the Explore page on your feed, then it is more worthwhile your time to focus on that feature.
And there you have it, Instagram Guides – one of the latest features launched by Instagram. I would love to hear your thoughts on this, how you have actually used Instagram Guides for your business.
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