Ahh the carousel, or ‘gallery post’, a great way to create value-packed posts full of information for your followers. But are there any downsides to using them?

You may have noticed that Instagram marketers absolutely love carousel posts. Like, they’re really into them. And there’s a good reason for this – it’s known as the ‘carousel hack’, if you create a post with more than one image, Instagram will serve it to your followers more than once.

The first time followers will see one of the slides on your feed, and the second time they’ll see another, so as a creator you only have to post once to get twice the exposure – win win!

The other great thing about carousels is that you don’t have to pack all your information into one slide, if you’re trying to explain a complex issue or make several points in one post, then you can use up to 10 slides to do so.

You can also show off your design skills (oh, designers also love carousels!) by designing elements that go across the slides, like an arrow that continues along the bottom of all images.

So what could possibly be the down side to carousels and why isn’t Instagram full of them? While carousels are great for saves, scrolls and likes, when it comes to getting people to share, you lose some of the shareability when you use a carousel. With all the information on different slides, there isn’t an easy way for your followers to share it all to their story at once.

How can you combat this? 

Make one slide of your carousel the shareable slide – maybe it’s a visually impactful title slide, or perhaps the last slide has a summary of everything you’ve gone through in your carousel.

PRO TIP: add a ‘share to your story’ prompt on the slide you want people to share to encourage them to take that action.

TLDR: when using carousel posts, make one slide super shareable.

I hope this helped you! If you want to learn more about Instagram marketing and how to grow your personal brand on the platform, download my 14 day step-by-step personal branding course.