Social media is the best place to find out what other people like. It does not matter if we refer to your favorite smartphone, the food that you lose, or that hobby that takes you several hours of training and fun every day. Instagram is one of the best places to discover these things and the guides, of all of them, are the best of the possible formats.
Until now you have used the social network as a place where you can see how beautiful the photos that your family and friends upload are, or show off yours. But you should know that you have many more alternatives. Now, we already know that reels are the latest trend, the one that comes directly from TikTok and that turns anyone into a star of the entertainment world with its videos of a few seconds.
But we are referring to something else, to a possibility that Instagram has offered relatively recently and which is known as “Guides”. To sum it up a lot, they are a kind of catalog summary in which we can group several different contents to show others a story that we want to tell. From a spectacular trip (before the pandemic, of course), a compilation of your publications on the social network, or a series of specific products that you are passionate about.
Also Read: How Instagram Can Help You Tell Your Brand Story
What types of guides are there on Instagram?
When we are going to create an Instagram “Guide” there comes a time when it will ask us what is the objective of making it. What do we want to achieve?
And depending on what we have in mind, so we are going to choose the type within the application. For now, and until the social network says otherwise, we only have three different categories available.
Instagram Guide of Places
The first is ” Places “, and the objective is very simple. Imagine that you are in love with the city in which you live and you want to discover it to all those friends and users who visit your profile.
Showing images taken by you (or any other user) of monuments, points of interest, bars, restaurants, streets not to be missed, centuries-old customs, and any other type of information that serves to captivate potential visitors.
It is also not intended to replace the local tourist office, but it will allow you to show others what they are missing.
Instagram Product Guide
If everything related to travel and tourism is not your weakness, you have a second alternative which is to make ” Products ” guides.
And the objective that you have is very simple: recommend to everyone who visits your profile anything that has you in love.
Preferably from honesty, because for juicy advertising contracts, there are already influencers who show off all kinds of perks in this regard.
Here, in this type of content, any criteria you can imagine fits. They can be food dishes, technology, video games, fashion in general, merchandising of your favorite team, etc.
The limit, as always, will be set by your tastes and imagination.
Instagram Guide to Posts
And finally, we have the third of the categories that are ” Publications “.
Here, unlike the other two whose contents we can also get from other Instagram profiles, we will only have at our disposal to select those photos that we have uploaded to the social network from our account.
In this way, it will be possible to generate a guide focused on a topic, a trip, or any other criterion that occurs to you from your timeline. For example, a summary of your year, or your time at the university, your first job, etc.
How can you create a guide on Instagram?
To create one of these contents you will have to go to your Instagram application on your mobile and access the profile tab.
Not the main page that appears by default, which is the home page with a summary of what those people we follow have uploaded to the social network.
Once there, you will see a “+” in the upper right. Tap there to go to the next menu.
As you can see from the screen that you have just above (right), a window will appear with several alternatives.
The last of all is the one that interests us, the ” Guides “. So we click on it to go to the menu with those three types of content that we can create and that we explain above.
As you surely already have an idea of what you want, we select the one that best suits our needs.
Now we are in the place where the guide is created as such. As we have chosen the third one, that of our “Publications”, the ones that we have uploaded since the beginning of time will appear.
In case of wanting “Places”, we would have to go to a GPS point where Instagram will show us content created there by the entire community, or by us.
That is, if we choose London, it will show us all the photos that have been uploaded from that location in the social network recently, to add all those that we like the most.
Once we have made the selection of the contents, it is time to publish it to share, if you want, with friends through messaging apps or whatever you want. As always, the possibilities are practically endless.