What is the secret to an exceptional carousel?
As a storyteller himself, Marc Gutman finds an important ingredient in carousels that he was able to use to his advantage. He shares his evolution of perspective towards carousels that helped him increase user engagement and attract business prospects!
Video Transcript
Keith Roberts 0:04
Instagram carousels, I see you're posting a lot of carousels on Instagram. I love them. I would like to know what are carousels for those that don't know. And what's the secret to an exceptional carousel?
Marc Gutman 0:16
Yeah, so carousels are the things that Instagram came out with last year, which are the ability basically to share 10 images. And so for a long time, I thought that a carousel was just about how can I load my posts with 10 photos of me snowboarding and drinking beer?
But what you can also do with them in a really cool way is you can tell the story or you can get a message across, I almost think of them like, remember those. And we still have them like on the way to steamboat and stuff like that. There's those signs for FM light, where they're telling you a story on the side of the road. It's kind of like that, it's like and you and you want to tell that story, just like any other storytelling format, you want there to be a hook, you want the you want to build some suspense and some tension, and you want to get people to pay off. So they'll go through your carousel.
And so, I found that I just love this format, being a story person. I really lean into it and what I realized and so I was always, you know, I saw these people, mainly designers doing carousels, and they were beautiful and cool. And that images that would bleed to the next slide and all this kind of stuff. And I kind of thought it was out of my reach. And I didn't think it was for me. But as I started doing them, what I realized is that the secret to a great carousel is in the writing, not in the design. And so and so all of a sudden, you know, then that's my strength. I'm a writer, and I'm like, oh, wait a second. That's where we're at. And if you look at my carousels, instagram.com/MarcGutman, M A R C G U T M A N, you will see that a lot of mine are text-based, you know, and I try to keep it really short.
And one of my Carousels I put out there was like, I think it said something the effect that carousels are like poetry for business. And I really believe that and it's really these ideas this way to have bite sized consumable thought chunks that you can, that you can tell a story. And I think that's really great. I'm seeing amazing engagement. And then like, like from I've mentioned this a little bit before, but I've played in other social media arenas and I and I never really like nothing ever happened. You know, I'd post stuff I do all this work, I create a ton of content. And then nothing happened.
And with Instagram, I'm seeing a ton of engagement both through the metrics, but also through people reaching out to me prospects are actually coming in. And here's a little secret that most people don't know about carousels is that what I do is after I post it on Instagram, a day or two later, I export that carousel into a PDF and I then post it on LinkedIn. I typically don't even change the caption or the copy all that much. If something in the in the copy and Instagrams that hate Instagram, I will say, hey, LinkedIn, but pretty much do that. And put it on LinkedIn, and it as a PDF that comes through as a carousel.
It's a very different kind of visual experience that most people are seeing on LinkedIn. And they're playing incredibly well. And LinkedIn, a channel that I used to think was just full of spammy sales people and boring professional people has actually become this like secondary market of social media for me where I'm getting double the use of the exact same repurposing the content, getting great response engagement and just able to show up to a whole different audience with the same content and so it's been really great.
