Did you know that the life span of an Instagram post is only 48 hours?

Yup. That’s it. It’s one of the many reasons why I don’t put all my eggs in one basket when it comes to marketing and attracting my ideal client, and I advise all my coaching clients to do the same. But we all know that Instagram is where a lot of potential clients are looking for a photographer so we, of course, can’t ignore that darn little app! But we CAN make sure we use all the features available to us to get more eyes on our work.

Today’s post is about getting more eyes on old posts. You know, those posts from several months, even 1-2 years ago, that are buried in your feed that still deserve some attention. The ones that had a life span of 48 hours and were then forgotten. The easiest way is to re-post them or share them to your stories here and there, but I’ve found there’s a better way. Enter Instagram Guides! If you haven’t seen this new IG feature, this post is for you.

Instagram Guides allow you to curate a list of posts, places, or products into a nifty little guide that lives in the “Guides” section of your Instagram Feed (next to the Reels icon). If you haven’t seen them yet, click here to see what guides look like. IG Guides are basically a perfect way to bring old posts back to life while creating a valuable resource for your current and potential clients.

So how do guides get eyes on old Instagram posts?

Well, first things first – the trick with guides is that if you want to use your past posts in the guide, you’ll have to, well… use past posts. This means that you’re limited to the posts in your feed. Think about it as a Round-Up blog post. It’s the same idea, only instead of a blog post linking to different blog posts circling around a specific theme, it’s the IG guide that links to different IG posts circling about a specific theme.

To get started, you’ll want to look through your feed to group and gather posts around a specific theme or topic. This way, you can include all the posts under that specific theme or topic and create a guide with them. For example, one of the “content buckets” in my Instagram marketing strategy is to share engagement photos on a regular basis. This allows potential clients to see what a session with me might look like, and it reminds them that engagement sessions are a service I offer without having to constantly promote them. For my first guide, I chose the topic of “Location Ideas for Engagement Photos in NJ”. You can view the guide here. I gathered engagement photos from over a dozen of my favorite engagement session locations and voilà! Now my audience has a place to look for ideas for their session *and* when potential clients check out the guide, they’re clicking over to the posts that are included.

Topic Ideas for Instagram Guides

Here are some ideas so you can start creating guides for your clients:

1. Location ideas
2. Helpful tips
3. Outfit ideas
4. Services you offer
5. Products you offer

Instagram Guide Tutorial

As far as actually creating an Instagram Guide, it’s pretty intuitive and user-friendly. If you’d like a brief overview, check out this IG Reel I posted recently:

 

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A post shared by Alex | Photography Educator (@its.alex.peterson)

I hope this gives you a few ideas to get you started with IG Guides so you can start getting more out of the posts you work so hard to curate and caption!

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