Instagram carousels: one topic, a finished post

A carousel is the Instagram post people swipe through. It is the format that sells a considered product, because you get five chances to explain instead of one. Writing and designing five slides by hand is the reason most sellers never post them.

The Carousels section of the AI Co-founder tab takes one line of topic and returns the whole post: the copy for every slide, every slide rendered as an image in your brand colour, a caption and a set of hashtags.

Make a carousel

1. 1Open the AI Co-founder tab in your store dashboard and choose Carousels.
2. 2Type the topic in one line. Be specific about what the reader gets: *5 ways to style our block-print dupatta*, *why cold-pressed oil tastes different*, *what goes into one jar of our pickle*. A vague topic gives vague slides.
3. 3Choose Slides: 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7. Each option shows its credit cost in the dropdown.
4. 4Choose the Style: Bold text slides or Product + text slides.
5. 5Optionally pick a Product. With Product + text slides this is what appears on every slide, so pick one with a good photo.
6. 6Press Generate carousel. Writing the copy and rendering each slide takes roughly 15 seconds a slide, so a five-slide post is about a minute and a quarter.

The two styles

• Bold text slides. A solid background in your brand colour with the slide's headline set large and left-aligned, plus your store name in a corner. No photographs and no drawings of people. This reads instantly in a scrolling feed and is the safer choice when your product photos are uneven.
• Product + text slides. Your product sits in the lower half of each slide with the headline above it, on a background tinted with your brand colour. Lighting and framing are kept consistent so the slides look like a set. Use this for a feature-by-feature story about one item.

Both styles render at 4:5 portrait, which is the size Instagram gives the most room in the feed.

What comes back

You get the rendered slides in order, each with the headline and the smaller line underneath it so you can read the flow at a glance, followed by a caption block.

• Slide 1 is the hook and the last slide is the call to action. The ones in between carry the argument.
• Headlines are kept to seven words or fewer and the smaller line to fourteen words or fewer, because longer text does not survive being read on a phone.
• There are no emojis inside the slide images. Emojis render badly as pictures. They can go in your caption instead.
• The caption is at most 300 characters, opens with a hook and closes with one call to action, with no wall of hashtags in it.
• Four to six hashtags come separately, under the caption.
• Press Copy on the caption block to put the caption and the hashtags on your clipboard together, ready to paste into Instagram.

The copy is written from your real product facts. It is told not to invent prices, discounts, awards or testimonials. Read it anyway before you post: you are the one whose name is on the account.

Getting the images out

There is no download button on the carousel view yet. To save the slides, go to the Overview section, find them under Recent creatives, and open each one. It opens full size in a new tab, and you save it the normal way: right-click and save on a computer, press and hold on a phone. Save them in order, because Instagram uploads them in the order you pick them.

SitesPlaced does not post to Instagram for you. There is no Instagram connection. The carousel is yours to upload when you want it live.

Getting better carousels

• Promise something in the topic. *5 ways to style our dupatta* beats *our dupattas*, because the reader knows what they get for swiping.
• Five slides is the sweet spot. Three feels thin, seven loses people before the call to action.
• Pick the product for Product + text slides carefully. Every slide shows it, so a soft or badly lit photo is repeated five times. If your photo is weak, make a clean packshot in the Creative studio first, set it as the product cover, then build the carousel.
• Write the topic in the language you post in. Hindi and Hinglish topics come back in Hindi and Hinglish.
• Re-run rather than settle. A second attempt at 60 credits costs less than a post nobody swipes.