Have you heard of Instagram Guides?
In the latest update, Instagram added a guides tab, which is shoppable and able to backlink to the original post.
There are three types of guides that you can create Places, Products, and Posts. Creating one of these guides is an excellent way to combine your content and share other people’s content on Instagram.
What Is Instagram Guides?
Guides are collections of your posts and other users’ posts related to a particular topic. Think of guides as Instagram’s version of a Pinterest board, or a highlight reel for your posts/shoppable products, or as your very own curated digital content catalog.
The guides you set up can be about anything you want, but I would encourage you to create relevant guides for your business. For example, when this feature rolled out, I made my first guide for Holiday gift ideas from Women-Owned Business Owners of products that I use daily. One of the most significant parts of guides is that they are shareable, meaning that other users can share your guide as a DM, in their story, or as a post. The other businesses are also notified that they appear in your guide.
How Can My Cannabis/CBD Business Use Guides?
With the three categories; Places, Products, and Posts, the possibilities for how your business can make use of this feature are endless.
The stipulations for paid advertising of cannabis-related products are just something that we are going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future, but creating a guide can be a great workaround for this.
Let’s say for example that you are a dispensary, you can use the product guide to feature products specific to your dispensary. Posts to your guide could include adding flower photos from the feeds of your growers, and any photos from the feeds of the brands that you carry as well as the posts that you curate for your feed. Think of it as a mini online “storefront” showcasing the incredible hand-curated products you select to sell in your dispensary.
This way when people have seen your guide and they step into your dispensary they will know the caliber of product your carry.
I have had a few B2B and other service providers reach out and ask me how they can use guides. B2B service providers can create guides related to your industry’s news, highlighting your posts related to the industry, and share other posts that resource another part of your industry that you do not specialize in but are essential.
Share Your Guide
Since this is such a new feature that snuck in the right under the holiday time, many users are not aware of this feature. To bring awareness, make sure you share the guide that you worked so hard to create in your stories and on your feed. Remember that the content you add to your guides will alert that specific user and they will share the guide as well.
If you need ideas on how guides could benefit your business, reach out for a FREE 20-minute consultation on making this feature work for you.