Instagram Is Saying Goodbye to Guides – What Now?

The Features and Capabilities of Guides

Guides on Instagram were a tool that let you group content by topic in a way that was genuinely practical for the audience, creating a kind of mini-blog. They got us to the content faster and more smoothly, neatly pulled together into a single, ordered thread. They made it possible to promote products, places or selected posts, increasing visibility and making a profile easier to navigate.

Imagine scrolling a website looking for "vegan recipes" but, instead of picking straight away from the different things you can do with tofu, you first have to skip past every other recipe yourself, filter the available options by hand and waste time getting lost in a flood of completely irrelevant content. It's far simpler when you can click into a purpose-built category you're actually interested in. In the past we'd have recommended that our clients use Instagram Guides to present posts in an organized way, but now we have to suggest other alternatives on Instagram.

Why Is Instagram Dropping Guides?

Despite their considerable potential, Guides never gained the popularity Instagram was expecting. Contrary to appearances, few users ever even looked at the feature, let alone started using it on their own profiles. Perhaps the launch itself wasn't announced loudly enough, so nobody was really paying attention. The platform, meanwhile, keeps evolving and works to optimize its features so it can focus on the ones that genuinely draw the most user interest.

What Are the Alternatives to Guides?

Story Highlights

Use Story Highlights to organize content creatively and clearly on your profile, varying the interface and giving it a defined character of its own. The thumbnails can carry any image you like, matched thematically to the highlight, and together with your posts and your profile picture they can round out an aesthetic whole. This option is especially useful when building a brand that's meant to be associated with a particular signature pattern, symbol, color scheme and so on. The huge advantage of Story Highlights over an ordinary post is that, unlike a post, you can put a sales link in there, and a highlight won't expire on us after 24 hours the way an ordinary Story does, so its sales link stays live the whole time, which frees us from watching the story's expiry every time and publishing it all over again.

Reels

Make short, eye-catching, attractive video guides to your products. The age of Reels has arrived; they're everywhere and most people prefer them. Their brief, condensed form delivers all the key information about a product at speed, which lands especially well with an audience after specifics and smooths out the whole buying process. Your customers will find them more easily thanks to the dedicated tab for them on your profile. Don't forget to always add a cover image to your Reel so it can actually be found.

Here's how to match the platform to your videos: Instagram Reels or TikTok? Which platform is better for your brand?

Carousels

Use carousel posts to present different product categories in a single post. For example: a client has a cosmetics store and builds a carousel around a line of products for sensitive skin. Good practice is to give the first tile over to a title – in this case as simply as it can be done, with no unnecessary long annotations: "cosmetics for sensitive skin".

Putting links in your bio

Instagram caps the number of those links at five, so if someone needs to add a few more, a good way out is to set up a Linktree account, where you can put in countless links. The added value of that app is the option to attach images to a given link, which makes it far clearer than on Instagram. And the Linktree link itself can happily go in your Instagram bio too.

Although we're saying goodbye to the exceptionally practical Guides feature, there's certainly no shortage of other ways to present content effectively on Instagram. These alternatives may even turn out to be more dynamic and more engaging for your audience.

Besides Guides, Instagram has also retired options like IGTV and Swipe Up. When you're building an effective strategy for your clients, remember not to rest everything on one piece of functionality – because one day you may suddenly find out that, just as with Guides, your main, trusted tool can be pulled from the platform.