A Guide to IG Guides
Posted
By Alaina Ruggery, Social Media Director
Social media continues to evolve as an essential to business. The continual debut of new social media tools across all channels has brought us Instagram (IG) Guides, one of the latest features introduced by the app. A cross between blog posts and carousels, this tool is an easy way to repurpose your best content. Let’s take a deeper dive below.
First off, what are IG Guides? IG Guides are a way to curate and group together pre-published feed posts, places with location tags or product recommendations. Every IG Guide includes a cover image, a title, introduction and separate entries. Within each entry, you’ll find another clickable image that can connect back to the original post along with optional descriptions. Guides live in a dedicated tab on your channel and can be shared on Stories or via direct messages. Just like Instagram captions, IG Guides can be edited, added or removed as often as you like.
Types of Guides: Currently, you can create an IG Guide based on “Posts,” “Places” and “Products.” The primary difference between each of these guide formats is where the content is coming from. An IG Guide with posts will pull from your feed or saved posts from other public accounts. For example, we created this Guide to What’s New in Wilmington, N.C. in 2022 for our client, Wilmington and Beaches CVB.
To create a “Places” guide, you’ll search via geotagged locations to curate your posts. For example, we worked with local Wilmington content creator @NikkiNetzer to produce an IG Guide featuring her favorite breweries in the area. You’ll see the location tags for each business are also included in this type of guide.
Finally, for a “Products” guide, you will search for the product listings you would like to include. To make it easy, you can save products to your “wishlist” to quickly pull them into one place. An example of an IG Guide from FWV and its New York City office, AMP3 PR client Tencel, showcases a Sustainable Fashion Forecast for Spring 2021 with the products linked in the guide.
IG Guide Tips: Given IG Guides don’t post to the feed your audience is scrolling through, the best method for ensuring your guides reach them, is to share IG Guides to your story. One of the greatest things about guides is that they don’t necessarily require you to create new content. Evaluate what you’ve already posted on IG and start organizing your existing content into categories your followers may find useful. Keep in mind, you can share IG Guides to stories as soon as they are created and continue to share them regularly for as long as they remain relevant!
Can You Measure Success? Until a few weeks ago, metrics to measure the success of IG Guides were unavailable, but IG recently launched the option to comment and like an IG Guide. While impressions are unavailable for IG Guides, you can share them to your channel Stories and measure engagement on the IG Guide tab.
Since Instagram is ever-changing, we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for additional channel updates to best serve our clients.