Creating Awesome Instagram Carousel Posts: Guide for Brands and Creators

Instagram carousel posts are one of the most adaptable and proprietary tools from the platform you can leverage to accomplish your target goals.

With their usage, showcase a new collection, you can boost your engagement levels, reach new audiences, and even drive product sales.

If you want to sprinkle variety to your feed, carousel posts are an incredible choice to convey your message to your target audience in a single post providing linear watching experience.

Authoritatively called “multiple-image posts” by Instagram, these posts can feature up to 10 photos or videos (or an amalgamation) that followers can swipe through. They act as a catalyst to grow your IG account, for which many creators and even celebrities buy Instagram followers.

What is an Instagram carousel post?

Have you noticed Instagram posts that have more than one photo? Or swiped right on any creator’s post to see the following picture in track?

Yes, those are called carousel posts.

Since February 2017, up to ten pictures or videos can be included in a single post, with the content appearing as a swipe-able carousel The feature initially limited photos to the square format, but received an update in eighth month of the same year to enable portrait and landscape photos instead.

A carousel is an assortment of images that by design switch - ponder it as tossing through a slideshow or book.

You can add a humorous caption, geotags, product tags, fundraisers, and tag people, while other users can still like, comment, and share your post.

According to Instagram, the most important engagements for feed ranking are comments, likes, reshares, and views for videos, which is really helpful to know as you plan your content and captions. As, engagement is a vital metric when comes to ranking with the algorithm, many creators buy Instagram comments for the same.

Research from Bannersnack highlights that Carousel posts score the highest engagement rate (1.94%) followed by images (1.74%) and video posts (1.45%).

Image source- Social Insider

IG is now the popular platform for following brands. This showcases not only the opportunities to sell products on Instagram, but also provide customer service and support.

Although these boosters have been around for a few years, they are speedily rising in popularity amongst brands and influencers for their high success rates.

Image- Marketing Charts

When a carousel is published, a small icon is attached to it in the upper right corner. As someone tosses to the second image, the icon is substituted with a counter that designates the number of frames. Minor dots also appear at the bottom of a post to mark growth through the carousel.

If a follower scrolls past a carousel post screening the first image, Instagram will represent them the same post next time with another photo or video from the carousel.

How to use an Instagram carousel?

• Use a carousel post to represent an assemblage of analogous photos or associated content to evade overpowering your feed with distinct posts.
• Use carousel posts on your feed or in ads when you have a range of products or services to drive customers or followers.
• Use a carousel to tell a story concluded by images or videos.
• Brands have been increasingly adopting this tool, publishing more of it from one year to another.

Image- Socialinsider

• Socialinsider partnered up with the design experts at Creatopy (formerly Bannersnack) to discover what it takes to create engaging carousels and how to design them.
• The study organized by them on 22,360,021 total posts, out of which 2,949,312 were carousels, lead to some important aspects;
• If in 2017 only 3 to 4% of Instagram content consisted of carousel posts, in July 2020 that percentage grew to 19.44%.
• Moreover, in May 2019, the percentage of carousel posts published (14.41%) surpassed the one of videos (13.79%).
• 19.44% of posts are carousels, a noteworthy growth matched to approximately 4% recorded when they were first available.
• Carousels are the most engaging Instagram posts: 1.92% average engagement per post.
• The most communal carousels have two slides (33.10%) or three slides (19.69%), but some carousels use the maximum number of slides (6.77%).
• When making use of all ten slides available, the average engagement rate per carousel goes over 2%.
• While image carousels are more frequent (88.8%), carousels that mix images with videos bring the highest engagement rates per post - on average 2.33%.
• 4.9% of carousels have messages that encourage users to swipe left, and they perform better, bringing the average engagement rate from 1.83%.

Also read: How to Create Instagram Reels

Instagram carousel size and requirements

Instagram carousel recommended sizes:

• Horizontal: 1080 x 566 pixels
• Vertical: 1080 x 1350 pixels
• Square: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Aspect ratio: Horizontal (1.91:1), square (1:1), vertical (4:5)
• Recommended image size: Width of 1080 pixels, height ranging from 566 to 1350 pixels (depending on the image is landscape or portrait)

Instagram video carousel specs:

• Length: 3 to 60 seconds
• Suggested formats embrace .MP4 and .MOV
• Aspect ratios: Horizontal (1.91:1), square (1:1), vertical (4:5)
• Maximum video size: 4GB
• Note- You can also post a combination of videos and images.

How to Create a Carousel in Instagram Feed?

Creating a feed carousel is a dissimilar procedure from your usual post. To make one, use the following steps:

Step 1- Head to your Instagram app and tap Add Post.

Step 2- Click Multiple-Image Post in the bottom right corner of the app.

Step 3- You can select up to 10 images or videos to add. You must select them in the order that you would like them to be posted.

Step 4- Hit Next.

Step 5- Swipe to look through the images that you have selected. You can click the overlapping circles to edit or include filters to each distinct photo.

Step 6- After employing your editing masters, hit Next.

Step 7- Include a caption and include tags if you want to. Then, hit Share to make your post go live.

Also read: Leverage IGTV for your business

How to Create Instagram Carousel Ads?

Instagram carousel posts make outstanding marketing tools! Particularly for showcasing your products that you want to promote on the platform Instagram’s potential advertising reach is 849.3 million users . Tools like carousel ad posts help you make the most to get traction!

Image- Hubspot

You can set your target audience and key objectives for every post. This mechanism permits you to capitalize on the influence of your carousel ads.

To create Instagram carousel ads, you require to have a Facebook Business Account. After you have an account, you can set up Facebook Ads Manager also. Once setting them both, follow below steps to create your foremost IG carousel ad.

• From Ads Manager: follow the steps to Create a Campaign, (goals & target audiences)
• From the Ad section, in Format, select Carousel.
• Click on Instagram Feed from the formatting toolbar.
• Upload your images or videos. You can also add a title, description, and website URL ad at this point.
• Review the placement and tracking and approve your Ad.

How brands are using carousel posts on Instagram

Instagram carousel ideas for brands:

• Showcase products and services
• Display collections
• Display collections
• represent before and afters
• Narrate a story
• Demonstrate a process or list steps
• Represent client testimonials
• Share blog post
• Share podcast clips or podcast audiograms
• Share memes and quotes
• Portrait a business event
• Fuel engagement.
• Craft their feed.
• Optimize ad placement.

Instagram carousel Best Practices

1. Promote a new product

Instagram carousels permit you to share up to 10 pics, videos, and text graphics with your target audience in one single post. It is a great way to showcase a new product to your customers. For example, Smash + Tess. As portion of their launch for an approaching collection, they used carousel posts to share photos of the different items in the new collection, worn by numerous different models. Carousels allow audience to get information about the products, and includes additional contextualization for how products can be used— which is an inordinate technique to encourage more conversions and leads.

2. Share a before and after

Carousel posts are an incredible way to deliver a before and after post. Before and after discloses are an inordinate way to represent an actual impact of your products or services, which is an extremely operative sales promoting practice. Its stimuli inquisitiveness, stimulating more engagement.

3. Deliver personalized recommendations

With the help of IG carousels, you can create content that is targeted to a wider audience, snowballing both your reach and engagement.

4. Tell a Joke

You can add multiple photos to post memes. This makes your followers engage in the slideshow and ask them to ‘swipe left’ to see more images.

5. For a big reveal

You can encourage followers to swipe through pictures for a ‘big reveal’ or surprise

6. Represent customer reviews

You can show positive customer reviews in your IG Carousel post. It is an easy way to encourage more people to use your services or products.

7. For tutorials

You can teach people how to do a particular thing.

8. Tell brand stories

These posts are a great way to share more targeted brand stories on Instagram, without disturbing a judiciously curated feed. You can create pictures of your physical store, early product sketches, or a video from your company meeting or event. They further help you to build stronger relationship with your audience and help you to humanize your brand.

9. Provide deeper information

They are great opportunity to showcase advanced details and close-up videos with your target audience.

10. Represent customer reviews

A brands’ success is habitually prejudiced by customer reviews. Sharing positive reviews with your followers is a boundless way to upsurge your visibility, engender curiosity in your products or services, and build brand trust on Instagram.

11. Represent user-generated content

Using an operative UGC strategy, you can increase brand loyalty, reinforce the sagacity of community on your channel, and drive more sales, leads, and conversions.

12. Promote engagement

You can add a swift call to action to your carousel post captions asking your followers to comment their favourite photo in the line-up. You can also ask your audience to take part in a poll or contest encourage more engagement.

13. Share event recaps

You can share photos from events or webinars which is a prodigious strategy for brands. Share multiple photos and videos that imprisonment the vigour of your events, without losing all of your followers with multiple posts, is a colossal benefit.

Instagram carousel templates

You can start by customizing one of the 5, professionally premeditated IG carousel templates in Canva.

Step 1- Get access to the templates by clicking the link: Instagram Carousel Templates

Step 2- Head to the page and you will see the template URL. Click Use Template

Step 3- Here you can see all templates. Choose one.

Step 4- You can swap in any photo by clicking Uploads in the side menu. Now click Upload an image or video and select whatever image you want. After uploading the image, just drag and drop from the menu into the frame you want the image to replace.

Step 5- Edit the text boxes by selecting the text and pasting in the new copy you want in your post. Use the circles on the corners of the textbox. You can make the box taller or shorter as required. Text colour, underline, font options, size options, font alignment and line spacing options appear directly above when a text box is selected. Highlighted in this screenshot is where you can edit text colour.

Step 6- Change the font size, style and background colour as you want.

Step 7- To change coloured blocks/shapes, select the shape and the coloured square in the top menu. Click the square and colour swatches which appears in the left menu.

Step 8- Now, click Download and save as a .png.

Step 9- If you want to save only one template of 5, open up Select pages and select the conforming template by clicking the square to the right, and then select Done.

Step 10- To split your image up for the carousel, head to Pine Tools and you’ll see a window, then click Choose file.

Step 11- Select the file you just downloaded from Canva

Step 12- After importing the file, select horizontal split, output as JPG or PNG and split by Quantity of blocks (equal width) and put 4 into the Quantity of blocks, then click Split image.

Step 13- Now under download pieces (images) you’ll see four pieces of your Instagram carousel split to size. Select each row 1, column 1, row 2 column 1; etc. button to download.

Step 14- Bravo! you have your four separated images to upload onto IG using the multiple-image upload. You must select images/videos in the proper order, or else your carousel will be posted out of order from the template.

Schedule Instagram carousel posts with Hootsuite

• 1. Head to Planner and click New Post to launch Compose
• 2. Choose the IG account you want to publish to.
• 3. Add your caption in the Text box
• 4. Head to Media and tap Select files to upload. Select all the images you want to include in your IG carousel. All selected images should appear under Media.
• 5. Add the necessary instructions in the Notes to Publisher section.
• 6. Edit date and time to schedule your post.
• 7. Tap Schedule. The post will appear in your Planner at the time you have scheduled it for.
• 8. At the scheduled date and time, you will get a mobile notification on linked number, that your post is ready to publish.
• 9. Hit the notification, which will open your notification centre in the Hootsuite App.
• 10. Click the top notification in the list, then tap Open in Instagram.
• 11. Your caption will be copied to your clipboard automatically.
• 12. Hit the + button and select the correct images
• 13. Use any filters to your images, as you would publish a normal IG post.
• 14. Paste your caption.
• 15. Hit OK. And congratulations! Your IG carousel has been published.

Instagram carousel examples

1. Random House Kids

The children’s publishing arm of Random House tell a story in carousel format.

2. Louise Damas

You can find out what’s inside the travel suitcase of jewellery designer Louise Damas’ brand manager? You need to swipe through to find out.

3. Coachella

You can see the musicians featured in the carousel posts.

4. Cleanfoodcrush

You will never require a recipe book if you follow Cleanfoodcrush’s IG carousels as instructions to cook good food.

I hope you found this a helpful guide to know all the details about Instagram carousels.

Feel free to share!