How would you like to create a seamless carousel post for Instagram to increase your reach and
engagement levels from your followers? According to Hootsuite the average carousel post gets
1.4X more reach and 3.1X more engagement than regular posts on instagram. So in this video
I'm going to show you the quick way to create a seamless carousel post for Instagram. Not only
that i'm going to show you how to insert a video into that carousel post for maximum engagement
levels and reach! We've got a fair bit to cover so let's hop into Canva.
Firstly I'm going to start off with a regular Instagram post. So I'm going to select that to bring it up onto my
desktop. To make a carousel post imagine sticking together one square template after the other
to make a horizontal panoramic post. You can 'stick' as many square templates together as
you like but I'm going to be using four. To calculate the entire width of the carousel
post I therefore need to multiply 1080 which is the width of a standard square Instagram template
by 4, and that gives me 4320. Fantastic! So now I'm going to go to the Resize tab in my Canva toolbar
and change the width of my template to 4320 and click on Resize. Great,
so I have my panoramic blank template. If you've not done so already go to the File tab in the top
LH corner of your toolbar and scroll down until you see 'Show rulers'. I want you to select that.
So now you have rulers at the top and at the side of your template. (Let me just get rid of that
for a second). Go back up to your File tab and now select 'Show margins'. And you can see here
there's a dashed, very faint dashed line inside your template and that's going to be a really
handy margin to help me place my content in the correct position. Next I want to mark out where
each square Instagram template finishes. So to do that I'm going to go to Elements,
click on a square shape, I'm going to increase the size until I've got the
regular square template size which is 1080x1080. I'm just going to shuffle this along to the end
and get rid of that. Now I want to mark out where this
square template finishes and to do this I'm just going to hover my cursor over the side
ruler and drag it across to create a marker. I'm going to repeat this step across my template
And now I'm going to delete the square. So you can see I've got
an internal margin on my template here and some handy guidelines.
And now I can start adding my content. You can use whatever you like; you can use photos, graphics,
illustrations it really doesn't matter. It depends on how you're going to use this carousel
to reach your marketing goals. The important thing to remember is that when posted to instagram your
audience will only see one square at a time rather than the entire panoramic post so you need to
consider what each square will look like to your audience before they swipe across to the next one.
I began customizing my carousel template by adding some shapes to the background. These are actually
called 'blobs' and they can be found in the Elements tab. Next I added a title and a short
description underneath. This will be the first image my audience will see once I upload the
carousel post to Instagram so I need to tell my audience exactly what this post is about.
I also added some custom squiggle shapes and illustrations. I bought these myself but you can
find them under the Elements tab and searching for them using keywords such as 'squiggles'
I think that's a great range of squiggle shapes, in fact I might just use one
right here. The next thing I did was to start uploading
photographs. You can use your own photos or you can choose from the Canva library
It's quite handy at this point if you don't have Canva Pro to upgrade since you'll have
access to thousands more high quality photographs and illustrations. If you bear with me until the
end of the video I'll share a link with you which will give you a 45-day FREE upgrade
which is exclusive to Canva Certified Creatives. I uploaded my own photographs using the 'Upload'
tab and selecting the media from my laptop. So the first thing I did was to select the first
of my photographs to bring it up onto my template. I then reduced it in size
slightly and then I made a kind of a mock-up using a photo of a laptop
You don't need to use a photo frame here. I'm just going to resize the photo
so that it fits perfectly like that. You may want to increase the size or zoom in to your
template just to make editing a little bit easier.
Perfect! Now you can see I've overlapped the mock-up slightly into the next square template,
here is my marker line which marks out the end of one square template and the start of the next one.
Now I've done that deliberately to indicate to my audience there's something beyond what
they're viewing right now. I also use this little squiggle across the dividing line to help lead
my audience's eye across to the next image in the carousel. It kind of piques interest in the viewer
and invites them to swipe to the next image. So next I'm going to work on the second image in the
carousel. I'm not going to waste your time by going through all the steps I took to create
my carousel so I'll run through this really quickly while you listen to some nice music.
That's all I'm going to add to my post. Don't be afraid to leave some spaces,
this is called 'white space' and actually when it comes to graphic design less is
definitely more. You don't want anything that's going to look really cluttered and confusing.
When you're done go to the top RH corner of your Canva toolbar and click on 'Download'.
You're going to download the entire image. I'm just going to increase the size slightly so that
it's nice and crisp. Download it as a .PNG file to your local desktop or laptop. I don't recommend
that you use a smartphone to do this because it's going to be really fiddly. Now keep this template
open because I'm going to come back to it in just a few minutes. Now go back to your Canva home page
and select instagram post. This will bring up a single square instagram template on
your Canva desktop. Now locate where you downloaded your panoramic image
and upload it to Canva again. Once uploaded select it once to bring it up onto your square template.
And this is the really fun part. What you're going to do is you're going to
increase the size of your panoramic image by dragging on the corner buttons
until the first part fits the square template. It may be easier for you to zoom out slightly but
I want you to see the details here. Excellent! Now what you're going to do is you're going to
click on the 'Duplicate page' button, you're going to detach the image from the background
and you're going to do this process again. I'm going to zoom out slightly to help me
And then you're going to grab hold of this side button and you're going to
delete the first part of the image like that, right up until the end of the template. Now
you're going to drag across the remaining part of the panoramic image like that.
And this is the second image in your carousel. I'm going to repeat this process two more times
And as you can see I've split my panoramic image into four separate images. Once you've finished
go to the download button you're going to select a .PNG file,
you're going to make sure that all pages are selected
and you're going to download them all as a zip file.
Over to my smartphone and from the gallery section I'm going to select those four images
and just post them to my Instagram feed
And here's my completed seamless panoramic Instagram post!
Now as I mentioned at the start of this video that's not all you can do.
I've discovered that you can easily upload a video to a carousel post. I've not seen many of them
around so this is going to be a really powerful feature. I'm going to delete this photograph
and instead replace it with a video. Now I've uploaded one of my own videos so you can use
either one of your own videos or you can choose from a selection from Canva. So here's my own
video and I'm just going to select it once to add it to my template. I'm going to drag it into the
frame and there it is. Don't forget you can crop your video by selecting it once
and going up to the pair of scissors icon in the top LH side of your toolbar, clicking on them
and there you have your video frame by frame. To crop the video you just hover your cursor over one
of these sidebars and drag it to the point that you want. When you're done just click on 'Done'.
Fantastic, so now I'm going to download this file as an MP4 video file. That's really important!
Now go back to the four separate images you created just a few minutes ago
to upload to Instagram, delete the first one, upload that video file,
select it to bring it up onto the template. Do exactly the same thing as you did
last time and drag the image so that it fits the template. Do the same with the second one
and all the others are the same. Now it doesn't matter that I've chopped off a bit of the video
here the main part of the video will be in the first template. Download the first two pages
one...two as MP4 video files
and you've already downloaded these two previously.
Back over to Instagram and you're going to select the two video files that you
downloaded as well as the other two image files in exactly the same way as you did before.
Post them to your Instagram feed and you have a beautiful and very unique video carousel post for Instagram.
Congratulations! Now you can go away and create some super-engaging carousel
posts for Instagram. If you enjoyed this video please do give it a like to support my channel.
If you'd like to learn more Canva tips and tricks they're coming up on the end screen
in just a few seconds. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.