Instagram adding Guides for recommendations, starting with wellness and COVID-19

Instagram is launching a new Guides feature today that lets creators curate content together in a single location, with the first ones set to focus on wellness content in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Some of the first Guides include one from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention called “Mental Health and COVID-19,” which collects the group’s content into a single, easy-to-find place. Heads Together, a mental health group, has similar Guides that collect Instagram posts reminding viewers to be kind to each other, practice self care, and talk about how they feel.

Guides live in a separate new tab on a user’s profile and aggregate several Instagram posts and videos with tips, commentary, and advice into a single place. Photos, galleries, and videos linked in Guides can either come from the user’s own profile or can be sourced from across other creators on Instagram; tapping on a photo or video in a Guide links users to the original post.

And of course, Guides can be shared to both Instagram Stories and in direct messages to other Instagram users. They’ll also start to appear in the Explore tab “in the coming days,” said the company.

For now, Guides appear to be limited just to the wellness-focused creators and companies that Instagram has selected to launch the feature, but it’s easy to imagine Instagram rolling out the tool for a much larger array of topics in the future.

:story: The Verge