A new way to explore and find content has come to Instagram. The social network introduces Guides, different spaces where tips and recommendations from influencers, organizations, public figures and more will be collected. The first guidelines focus on wellness and recommendations for COVID-19.
On the occasion of the pandemic, Guides will debut with a series of guides related to well-being and mental health. For example, a series of tips to deal with discrimination, anxiety or loneliness as a result of COVID-19. This, however, will expand to more topics and of different kinds over time.
To be “reliable information” as indicated by Instagram, the guides will appear in the profiles of verified influencers, national institutions or in the media, for example. The first guides, for example, have content from Unicef, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Headspace or BuzzFeed.
“A new way to discover recommendations on Instagram”
The guides will soon appear in the Explore tab as well, although they are currently only available in the profile of these relevant institutions and figures. They appear as one more tab next to the posts and content where they have been tagged.
When entering one of the guides, the layout is similar to an article with steps to follow. Title, author, short descriptive texts and the publications of videos and images collected for said guide. Clicking on these publications goes to the original content for more details. Obviously it is possible to share the guides in the stories or by direct messages.
This new feature is certainly interesting to give more visibility and publication tools to influencers, companies or organizations. Adam Mosseri, responsible for Instagram at Facebook comments that it is “a new way to discover recommendations on Instagram”. Over the years Instagram tested with several features, the stories, for example, have been a success, functions as IGTV not. As they say about Guides:
We want Instagram to be a place where you can easily find reliable information and inspiration from your favorite accounts. That is why we are introducing Guides, a way to more easily discover recommendations, tips and other content from your favorite creators, public figures, organizations and editors on Instagram.
Time will tell. At the moment the guidelines are limited to health and wellness for some selected accounts. As the weeks go by we will possibly see more themes and spread to more accounts.