Instagram’s expanded Guides highlight products, places and posts
Instagram’s Guides are now useful for more than offering self-care tips. The social network has expanded Guides to everyone, and you can create them for products, places and even individual posts. You can suggest the skin care products you like to use, for instance, or recommend a favorite destination for when it’s safe to travel again.
You can find guides in profiles, and share them either as Stories or DMs with your friends. Not surprisingly, Instagram is using this as a hook for shopping — product Guides can feature in the Instagram Shop hub.
Guides are Instagram’s next push into deeper, long form content after IGTV, and the expanded categories make its ambitions clearer. While the product guides could clearly help it make more money in the short term, this is also about keeping you engrossed in content rather than simply scrolling through your feed. That, in turn, could keep you from drifting toward rival social apps.
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