Instagram Guides are curated groups of posts, products, or places that you can offer your audience.

With this feature, you have the ability to consolidate content around specific topics to act as a resource, making it easier for your account (and your content) to get discovered.

Instagram Guides are exactly that: a guide of a specific flow of content chosen by the creator. Guides are essentially a creative long-form blog post or e-commerce promo, but most of the work is already done for you!

Anyone (yes, even you!) can use Guides as a way to grow their business. The biggest hurdle to overcome is taking the first step, and we're here to help!

Keep reading to learn how to use Instagram Guides to get your content in front of your dream customer’s eyes.

Marketing your business on social media can be hard, especially when it seems like there are new features being rolled out every few months...but it’s easy to see WHY Instagram Guides deserve your time and attention in order to get your content in front of your ideal client or dream customer.

Guides provide many benefits, including the ability to get discovered by your ideal client with their shareability and searchability.

Basically, they are another way to market your business on social media, meaning they are another way to get your content discovered by your ideal client or dream customer, providing another opportunity to produce valuable content and build trust with your audience.

Now that you know WHY you should use Instagram Guides, let’s chat about the HOW!

Currently, there are three types of Instagram Guides to use depending on the type of content that is shared: place, product, and post.

Although you can create all three types of Guides, depending on the structure of your business, a certain type could be more advantageous than others!

Place Guides

Recommend places in your city and beyond

A great option for physical-location businesses, Place Guides showcase where your business is. Thanks to the geo-tag capability, you can choose posts that are tagged to a certain location.

Another advantage for this type of Guide is that any post with your desired geo-tag can be added to the Guide, meaning that apart from using your own content, you can also aggregate content from customers, clients, or anyone who has tagged your location, letting their posts do the selling for you!

Use Place Guides if your business content can include a physical location, such as where your business is located or local recommendations for your ideal client.

Providing a Guide that highlights local businesses aside from yours not only drives potential clients to your neighborhood but also shows your support for other businesses. This is a great way to build trust with your followers and provides opportunities for networking and collaboration in your community!

Post Guides

Recommend posts you created or saved

Giving access to consolidated, curated content, Post Guides are a great way for any type of business to aggregate posts that you’ve either created yourself or saved from other accounts. This type of Guide is a great option for service-based businesses.

Similar to searching for specific hashtags within Instagram, Post Guides allow you to group content based on their topic. Since the posts have already been made, all you have to do is come up with headlines and commentary.

Although you can select up to 30 posts to share in one Guide, I recommend making each Guide as niched down as possible.

By creating a Guide that aggregates your helpful content by category, it makes it easier for your ideal client to gather information. It’s also a great way to serve your followers in a new way and is a great opportunity to showcase how you help your ideal client!

Ready to get started on your first guide?Let’s walk you through creating your first one!

We don't know about you, but we've always been huge proponents of working smarter, not harder.

This is why we recommend making your first Guide a Post Guide, grouping similar posts you have already created together!

This will make it easier for your audience to see similar content grouped in one place, and you won’t have to come up with new, original content for your first Guide.

For example, if you’re a wedding photographer and you’ve created Instagram posts in the past about what to wear to an engagement shoot, your favorite engagement shoot locations, and 5 posing tips for couples, then aggregate these posts for your first Guide on How to Prepare for Your Engagement Shoot.

On your profile page, click the + sign and select “Guide”.

From here, select which type of Guide you’d like to create. In this example, we will be walking through a post guide where you will be prompted to select from the posts you’ve already created.

Once you've selected your posts, it's time to format your guide. Add a title, description, and sentences between each image to connect them and make sure you add a title for each guide to make sure you can proceed to the next step.

At this point, you can preview your Guide and test the experience. See something you don't like? Hit the arrow on the top left-hand corner and make your edits. Remember, done is better than perfect! Click that “Share” button and congratulate yourself for completing your first Guide.

To see this in action, check out Jasmine's first Guide, How to Make an Instagram Reel, where she grouped together 4 past posts with commentary to tie them all together!