U-05: Reels, Carousels and IG Stories
SOP ID: U-05
Title: Reels, Carousels and IG Stories
Category: User Guide
Version: 2.0
Last verified: 2026-08-07 against origin/main @ aedbc19
Audience: Socially Sold course members
Prerequisites: U-02 Your Brand Foundation
How all three work
The three generator tabs follow the same shape:
- Make your choices — a few chips and options, no long form to fill in
- Add context if you want — free text, plus toggles for your saved Success Stories, CTAs and Core Phrases
- Generate — you get one properly-shaped draft
- Refine in the chat that opens — the form collapses and your draft becomes the first message in a chat
Step 4 is the part people miss. You are not stuck with the first draft, and you do not have to start over to change it.
Reels
Pick one of three kinds:
| Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
| Neighborhood lifestyle | Sell the block, the coffee shop, the Saturday morning. Place-anchored lines that make a buyer picture living there |
| Footage + text | Footage of the neighborhood, the listing or the lifestyle, with your hook and points as on-screen text. No face on camera |
| Home tour | Walk the buyer through the property, first-person, room by room |
You get an on-screen hook and a caption. Footage + text is the one to reach for if you are not comfortable on camera yet.
Carousel
Pick your slide count:
| Slides | When |
|---|---|
| 4 | Tight — hook, three beats, CTA. Fast to make, easy to read through |
| 5 | The sweet spot. Room for a strong hook, a solid middle and a clear close |
| 6 | More depth, when the topic needs context before the payoff |
Suzie shapes it as a listicle, an educational piece or a myth-buster depending on what you asked for.
Carousels have something the other tabs do not: you can open the slides in an editor, adjust them and download them as images. See SOP U-06: Editing and Downloading Carousels.
IG Stories
Pick a goal:
- Drive engagement
- Educate your audience
- Behind the scenes
- Market update
Then pick 1, 2 or 3 stories.
Stories are built around the Socially Sold Story frameworks, including the 120-day Story calendar from the course — so a sequence follows a structure that has been taught, not an improvised one.
Adding your own context
Under the main choices there is a free-text box plus toggles for your saved material.
The free text is for the specifics of this post — the address, the price drop, the open house on Sunday.
The toggles pull in your Success Stories, CTA Collection and Core Phrases. Anything you toggle on gets used deliberately in that generation, not just noted in passing.
Refining a draft
Once you have a draft the tab becomes a chat with the draft as the first message. From there:
- "Make the hook harder"
- "Swap the CTA for the one about my buyer guide"
- "Shorter, this is too long for a reel"
- "Why did you open with a question?" — she will explain rather than rewrite
The refine chat is locked to that format. Refine a reel and you get a reel back; refine a carousel and you get carousel slides back. No drifting into the wrong shape, and no course links cluttering a draft you are about to copy out.
When you are done, the Create a new reel / carousel / IG story button resets the tab for the next one.
What you get, and what you do not
Drafts are post-ready content only. The hook, the caption, the slides — nothing else.
There is no "why this works" paragraph attached. That is deliberate: you are copying this into Instagram, and you did not ask to be convinced. If you do want the reasoning, ask in the refine chat.
Related guides
| Guide | Topic |
|---|---|
| U-04 | Content Chat |
| U-06 | Editing and Downloading Carousels |
| U-07 | Refining and Feedback |
| U-08 | What Suzie Cannot Do |