Have you started implementing carousels in your Instagram posts and ads? If you haven't explored this tool yet, we encourage you to discover all the benefits that carousels can bring to your influencer marketing strategies. Join us as we explain how you can use this format effectively and successfully in your next campaigns.
Instagram carousels are a format that allows you to share up to 10 images or videos in the same post. To see all the photos or videos in a carousel, users must swipe through the content, either in the Instagram feed, in the profile, or in the explore section.
This feature was launched by the platform in 2015 and over the years has gained great popularity as it is an efficient way to share multiple moments of a single event, tell a story, or even showcase multiple products at once. Likewise, Instagram carousels are especially useful for brands and influencers who want to provide a more detailed experience to their followers.
Creating video or photo carousels on Instagram is a fairly simple process. Here’s the step-by-step:
The technical specifications for Instagram carousels are as follows:
We recommend you read: Love it or hate it, video is driving higher engagement rates on Instagram.
To design Instagram carousels, there are several platforms with visual elements and templates that facilitate that task. Here are some of the most used tools:
Canva is a popular online design tool that allows you to create a variety of visual content, including Instagram carousels. Canva offers users hundreds of ideas with templates and visual elements to design attractive and customized carousels.
The app is easy and intuitive to use even when you have no experience in graphic design.
Illustrator is a vector graphics creation software that allows you to make custom designs for Instagram carousels. If you are interested in using Illustrator for your carousels, just do the following:
To create carousel posts with Photoshop follow the steps below.
For videos, the process is similar. You will need to create or edit your videos in another program before importing them into Photoshop, but once they are in Photoshop, you can organize them into layers and then export them as you would images.
Yes, there are different apps and programs that allow you to create and download carousel templates for Instagram. Some of the most common tools are Visme, Panoslice, Canva, and collage making apps like Moldiv or Instagram Layout. In addition, there are specific carousel apps like Carousel by Dropbox or Later that also have predefined templates with a variety of visual elements for creative carousel ideas .
The carousel format on Instagram offers a great opportunity to enhance your brand and promote products in a creative and dynamic way. Thanks to the possibility of sharing up to 10 images or videos, it is ideal to showcase the details of your offer in a single post without cluttering your feed with advertising content.
Carousels are also ideal for telling stories about your brand or product. You can create a visual narrative that shows how your product is used or how it was made. Carousels are also great for creating tutorials or demonstrations of your products. Each slide can show a different step of how to use it, providing a valuable visual resource for your followers.
As we have seen, Instagram carousels have become a fundamental tool in the digital marketing world to tell stories and create more engaging ads. Here are some examples of Spanish brands that have used this format to boost their messages.
Netflix is the king of telling stories and taking advantage of Instagram carousels. In most cases it uses them to promote its own series and movies, showing different images, clips, and details of each title in a single ad. It also uses the format to draw attention to relevant content, specific events, or holidays.
HelloFresh is a company that offers kits to prepare easy and healthy recipes at home and another brand that uses carousels successfully. In its carousels, the company shows the various dishes that can be created from its product offerings, preparation tips, as well as the benefits of some foods or key messages of its company DNA.
The renowned airline Iberia, which has more than 644K followers on its Instagram account, uses carousels to promote the destinations to where it is flying. The company also uses carousels to promote contests, highlight the work of their employees and, in general, to express messages about the company’s values.
Carousels have become a powerful tool for brands to tell their stories. In fact, several studies have shown that Instagram carousels can generate more benefits compared to other formats, such as still images or videos.
It is estimated that the average interaction rate per post of Instagram carousels is 1.92%, which is higher than the average interaction rate of regular images (1.74%) and videos (1.45%). This means that users interact more with Instagram content containing multiple images or videos than when they are viewing a single piece at a time.
And although Instagram carousels have the highest engagement rate, they only account for 19% of Instagram content. This shows that most marketers are still not making use of the power of carousels to gain more engagement with their target audiences on this social network.
You might be interested in: How to improve engagement rates on Instagram in 2023?
Carousels allow users to share up to 10 images or videos in the same post. This feature allows to capture people’s attention for a longer period of time. In fact, it has been found that using all 10 slides in a carousel post can increase the engagement rate to over 2%.
By providing this more interactive user experience, the carousel format is undoubtedly a good idea for brands to increase the likelihood of getting comments, likes, and shares on their posts. Confirming this, a study by Socialinsider found that Instagram carousels have a 10% higher response rate than single image posts.
Instagram has adjusted its algorithm to show carousels in users’ news feeds for a longer period of time. This means that carousels can appear in followers’ news feeds multiple times, increasing the likelihood of interaction.
One of the great advantages of creating your own carousels for product recommendations or simply sharing key messages about your brand is that you have more space to tell your stories. The carousel format invites people to swipe left and continue exploring to the end of your post. This action can increase the engagement rate from 1.83% to 2%.
Recommended reading: How to do it: product placement on Instagram.
For influencers, carousels represent a useful tool to communicate with their followers. Generally, they use this format to create more engaging content.
For example, when brands establish collaboration agreements with influencers, they can create carousels to explain the advantages of a certain product or offer tips on how to use it better. In the case of fashion influencers, most of them make use of carousels to show their outfits. The content creator can then tag the brand and thus share the garment with their community, enabling that product to potentially go viral.
You might also be interested in: Influencer marketing guide for fashion brands.
In the case of influencers who engage in creating vlogs, they may post a series of images that chronicle a day in their life, detail a transformation process, or show the stages of a personal project. This can give followers a more intimate view of their life and connect them more deeply with their content. It is precisely these bonds and relationships of trust that allow brand or product recommendations made by content creators to have the expected effect on audiences, translate into greater sales opportunities, and brand positioning.
We recommend reading: How to measure the impact of influencer marketing on sales?
Finally, carousels can be a great way for influencers to interact with their audience. Content creators often use this format to ask questions, start discussions, or invite followers to participate in some way. This can help increase engagement and strengthen the relationship between the influencer, brands, and their followers.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.
