Another type of top performing posts is graphic carousels. These have been around for a while. So I'm sure we are all used to seeing this type of design in our feed just in case I need to get you up to speed basically a carousel is just a multi-image post on Instagram that you can swipe through and what I call a graphic Carousel is essentially a nicely designed slideshow providing some kind of information to your viewer these types of posts usually Focus mainly on providing educational content for your audience. And in my experience in what I've observed delivering that information in a more minimal clean design is what is most effective currently we've seen lots of different design Trends with you know, canva graphic carousels basically and I think back when they were first becoming popular more busy overly designed lots of different little features and add-ons that was kind of popular, but I think what we're seeing more And more is just straightforward text on a background something that's very clean and minimal and not distracting.

So now that we know what graphic carousels are, let's talk about why exactly they are so effective on Instagram right now. There are four main reasons why graphic carousels are so effective for your growth on Instagram for one their educational and super high value. They also really increase your engagement like you tend to see a lot of Engagement with this type of content. Therefore you have higher reach with this kind of content. And finally I find that this type of content is the most effective of all the different kinds of feed content actually converting new viewers into followers. So let's talk about all those reasons. So obviously these tend to be educational graphic carousels tend to be jam-packed full of information that is going to be super valuable and useful for your reader. This gives you an opportunity to really establish your expertise and Authority it helps to build trust with your audience now because graphic carousels are so educational and so valuable. There are also very likely to be saved and shared by Or audience which brings us to my second point they increase your engagement rate. I have personally found and I've seen this across client accounts that really valuable graphic carousels tend to be the most saved content. On my entire account wrong clients entire account. It makes a lot of sense, right? If you can picture your audience member scrolling they come across your post. You've got a ton of great information that they might want to apply later. They save it so they can revisit your post in the future or if it's a message that they really want to send on to Their audience as well. They might share it to their Instagram story which again helps to increase your organic reach. So of course because we talked about before the algorithm depends on monitoring people's engagement and when the algorithm sees a post having high engagement, it gets pushed to more people.

So therefore because graphic carousels are so engaged with through people saving it and sharing it therefore you get more reach with them too. And so it's very likely that you're highly informative and well designed graphic Carousel is going to end up on some people's explore Pages. Therefore you have the opportunity to have this content serve two people who don't know who you are yet and because graphic Cells do such a great job at providing value establishing your expertise and Authority. It makes even a totally brand new potential follower trust you through the course of reading through your Carousel and therefore by the end. They're more likely to start following you because they're going to want to see more I have found a cross-the-board when it comes to non-reals feed content. My graphic carousels are the best format for generating new followers for my account. So even though real seem like the shiny new format, and yes, they are very effective. Like I talk to it in the last video graphic carousels really shouldn't be overlooked when it comes to how effective they can be for growth. So that being said, let's dive in and I'll show you how to make one.

So for the graphic Carousel, I want to show you two pretty effective formats one is more photo based. I've been seeing this a lot more recently and then one is gonna be just minimalist text graphic design. So we'll start out with the photo one. We're gonna use canva. Everybody loves canva. So I think it's the best tool for this. Obviously if you love Photoshop procreate or whatever you do you but I wanted to show you how to do it in canva. So I've just created a new folder just for the sake of organization for Katie and Dan in a van and we are going to create a design and I am actually going to do this when a custom size because with the photo version of the carousel, I think it's great if we can take advantage of all the vertical space that Instagram gives us so we're gonna make our width still 1080 but we're gonna make our height 1350 and this is basically a four by five aspect ratio. It's like the most vertical you can make your photos on Instagram. So we're gonna create that design.

Okay, and obviously we're gonna need a few pages for this. So I'm just gonna go ahead and start by making five pages for this Carousel. Now, I'm gonna go over and I'm gonna upload some photos that I've selected that I think will work. Well with the carousel that I have in mind. I was thinking of doing a concept that's like van life isn't for everyone here is what it takes to really live in a van full time and kind of talk about the sort of Personality or demeanor that you need to have to make this lifestyle work. So I'm gonna just start with this as my main image. And then I'm gonna add text over top. So in canva, you can add a new text box just by hitting T. And then of course you can drag and size it up. I'm going to make my text. white or kind of off-white Okay, so I really like how my cover image is coming together. I think it might be helpful to add a little graphic that indicates the users they can swipe through to read more. So I'm just gonna search swipe in canva and I think I like this one and I'm Gonna Change it to my same like off white color there and I'm just gonna move it to the bottom corner here. And hopefully people will notice that and swipe on to the next slide. Okay, so I'm gonna head back to uploads and pick another image and keep adding my text. Sometimes to make it easy. I'll just go back and copy a text box from a previous slide and paste it. So I have the exact same size and formatting to keep it consistent.

So that's really all there is to it. We're just gonna keep adding in our photos adding in our text. I mean canva is very straightforward which is why I love it and you can create some really professional looking content with it. So I'm just gonna keep adding my photos and text until I'm finished. you All right. There we go. A carousel very quickly put together in canva that I think is very shareable and eye-catching because it's incorporating some more visuals like using photos but this isn't necessarily for everyone. I think this works particularly well because it's in the van life Niche and people live for the beautiful travel photos, but I did want to show you an alternative style which I think is really effective in most other niches. So we're gonna go back to our homepage here and create another design and we're just gonna go ahead and use the Instagram post standard dimensions because I think when it comes to graphics with text somehow the square just looks better, but it's a preference thing. You can do four by five aspect ratio for this too.

First of all, you're probably familiar with canva templates, but a great place. Start is just simply searching Carousel in the canva templates and looking for one that you really like the look of like personally. I like this. I think it's cute. I know it's not necessarily minimalist, but I think that it balances the amount of color and design really well with like a small amount of text. I just don't think you'd want to do something that looks like this and then add a whole lot of additional text to it. So I think this can work really well again, it's gonna be about preference though and about what your audience loves and what kind of style they like you can really easily create your own sort of canva template as well. But it's it's great to start from somebody else's as a kind of building block to begin with I actually think I am gonna go for this one because I like the vibe. I like that. It has a bit of a retro feel which I think kind of connects with like van life in some ways. So I'm just gonna start and change these colors over to my brand colors of the colors that I want to use for this Carousel and then start filling in the text. Here's a feature that I love about canva. If you go to change one of the colors in your template, it's going to detect that that color is used more than once and so you can just easily Click Change all and that is going to modify the entire template at once so you don't have to go through selecting every single color and switching it, which is awesome. So there you have it again. This is super straightforward just adding text into acute design in canva as a really effective method for sharing your message with your audience, and it's also really shareable.