How do you make an instagram highlight

Everything You Need to Know About

May 24, 2022

What do people see first when they open your Instagram profile?

Your bio information and of course right below one of the most useful Instagram features, the Instagram stories highlights!

They are front and center on your profile, serving as the perfect indicators to show users what your brand is all about. You can have the best Instagram stories that you re-share from your followers and build a perfect user-generated content highlight as social proof for your brand’s quality.

Unlike Instagram Stories that disappear after 24 hours, Instagram Stories Highlights can live permanently on your profile. This is why you should consider spending some time planning on how to apply them to showcase and promote your brand.

In this guide, you will learn all you need to know to create Instagram Highlights that will help you stand out from the crowd.

What’s inside:

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1. What are Instagram Story Highlights?
2. How to Create Instagram Highlight?
3. Why Instagram Highlights are so Important?
4. How to add Instagram Highlights covers or icons?
5. How to design Instagram Highlights Cover Icons
6. Instagram Highlights examples to get inspired
7. Tips for creating effective Instagram Story Highlight covers
8. How to display Instagram Highlight on your website?

1. What are Instagram Story Highlights?

We all know that Instagram stories disappear in 24 hours. And, in order to give the option for the users to save some of the stories and make them visible as a pin in their profile, Instagram has provided a feature called Highlights. The feature allows you to keep your stories content on your Instagram feed as long as you want.

Instagram Highlights are groups of stories that you can create as folder sections on your Instagram profiles.

This means that once you post a story you can save it in a Highlight (like a folder) that will display on your Instagram profile, or you can activate the Archive option that will automatically save Instagram stories and in the future create highlights from the saved stories in your archive.

The main attributes of the Highlights are:

Highlights covers – option to add a custom image or an icon that will represent the topic of the stories that are saved inside;
Highlights name – option to name the Highlight the same as you do with naming folders.

Note that, once you create the Highlights they appear in your Instagram profile screen right below your bio text and profile photo.

FYI: You can embed Instagram widget automatically with EmbedSocial’s UGC platform. Start a free trial and display your social media widgets now.

2.

How to Create Instagram Highlight?

As mentioned above, you have two ways how to create an Instagram Story Highlights:

Create Highlight from the active story – Post a story and manually save it in a Highlight
Create Highlight from archived stories – If you have the Archive option activated, your stories will save automatically in your archive section, and in the future, you can choose which stories to be organized in a Highlight.

Let me show you how to create a Highlight with the first option:

Create Highlight from the active story

If you have an active story and you want to make sure this story is added to a Highlight just follow these steps:

Tap on the active story to view it
Tap the bottom option Highlight
Tap the plus icon to create new Highlight
Enter the name of the new Highlight
Tap the blue buttons Add

Create Highlight from an active Instagram Story

Once you do this, your new Highlight will appear on your profile photo and your followers will be able to view it even after the 24 hour story lifetime.

Create Highlight from the archived stories

There is a possibility to create highlights from the stories archive as well. Using the story controls and options you can pull the stories you save to archive.

To add Instagram stories from your archive to a highlight and pin them on your profile, follow the steps below:

Go to your Instagram profile and tap Story Highlights below bio
Tap the plus icon
In the new window, tap and select the stories you want to appear in the Highlight and tap Next.
Tap ‘Edit Cover’ to choose which story will appear as a Highlight icon or just upload an icon
Enter a name for your Highlight
Tap Add (iPhone) or Done (Android).

How to add more stories in a current Highlight

You can add more photos or videos to your highlight at any time by following these steps:

Go to your profile and hold your finger pressed on the Highlight you want to edit
Tap Edit Highlight
Choose the stories you want to add and tap Done

Also in this ‘Edit Highlight’ screen, it’s text and it’s the cover image. And if you want to delete the Highlight, just press and hold on to the Highlight you want to delete and choose the option ‘Delete Highlight’.

3. Why Instagram Highlights are so Important?

Instagram Stories have become one of the main channels for brands to connect, engage, and gain real results from their digital marketing activities. Understanding Instagram stories for business can be one of your main competitive advantages for your 2020 marketing activities.

Therefore, having hard-produced story videos or images, saved for future followers to view at any time, make the Highlights feature very important for the community managers and digital marketers.

The main reasons why you need to use Instagram Highlights, are the following:

Use this new format to tell an ongoing story
Make the content of your stories accessible to new followers
Educate them about your previous activities posted in the stories
Showcase your products or services, in a structured and categorized way
Provide library format of useful content that you’ve already shared

4.

How to add Instagram Highlights covers or icons?

The covers and the text of the Instagram Highlights are gaining huge popularity due to the fact that these small icons are the first thing a new visitor to your Instagram profile will see.

You will notice that the cover images are usually the images in the stories that you’ve selected for that particular Highlight. But, this tutorial, will show you how to change the Highlights covers without sharing them in a story.

Before you start, please add the icon images in your phone’s camera roll and follow these steps.

Go to your profile and hold your finger to the Highlight you want to edit
Tap Edit Highlight
Tap Edit Cover
Choose the photo from your camera roll
Tap Done

That’s it! Now you have your Instagram highlight covers!

As for your other social media and Instagram feed, you can also design your own free icons for your Instagram stories.

For this challenge, I will definitely recommend Canva.

It is a very easy tool and it already has predefined icons that you can easily re-use to make Instagram highlights covers.

You will only need to follow the steps below, and in a very fast time you will be able to create your highlight covers:

Open Canva and click Create a design
Choose the Instagram story format
Choose any template, delete its content and change the background color
Go to Elements and in the search field type icon. Choose the preferred icon, set it in the middle and choose its color
Share this design to your email and save it to your phone’s camera roll

Once you want to change the cover, just choose this icon from your phone’s camera roll.

6. Instagram Highlights examples to get inspired

Once you know how you want to create the icons, you will need to make a plan for the overall design of the Highlights section.

This is a current trend, and as you are probably aware you want to make sure people coming to your profile click on these icons and check your great Instagram stories.

In the following section, you can find some interesting ideas on how to organize the Instagram stories and design the Highlights covers.

Here are few Highlights covers for inspiration:

1. Glossier Inc. is a people-powered beauty ecosystem – they use pink color only for their profile image (not a logo) and for the Highlights covers they use only blank–white images or product-line images. Very minimalistic and very different than other accounts, which usually use icons or some product images.overs they use only blank–white images. Very minimalistic and very different than other accounts, which usually use icons or some product images.

2. Carrots n Cake Flexible Macro Plans & Coaching – provides a very indebted structure about their content published via Instagram stories and uses all light-orange icons with the same layout to represent all different categories of the Highlights.

3. Starbucks Coffee – they use real people photos as they use real people photos or cute green product images as cover icons for the Highlights. This appeal brings the design of their profile to life and it makes the visitors feel the user-friendliness of the profile.

7. Tips for creating effective Instagram Story Highlight covers

Instagram highlights popularity has definitely resulted in them being an essential element of every Instagram profile.

So, to make sure you keep up with the latest trends, we combined some tips with real examples to showcase how you can design the Highlight covers to get the best of this Instagram feature.

Tip 1: Be innovative. Use words instead of icons or vice versa

When creating Highlight icons, make sure it is in line with your brand identity but still have fun, and try to be as innovative as possible to make that small space eyecatching.

For example, see how Instagram for business is doing this.

They use their colors but not for designing the cover icons.

They’ve literally swiped the spaces.

They use the actual icons for cover icons. Cool right?!

Tip 2: Use bold icons and text to emphasize your highlights

Take a look at how the French beauty chain Sephora is doing this.

They use simple, but cute icons to demonstrate their activities on Instagram, from posting stories about new products or categorizing these stories by a product type.

Tip 3: Use your brand colors

To make your profile have a cohesive look and keep your brand voice, try including your brand kit in your Instagram highlights covers.

See how the American chain of restaurants Shake Shack is doing this.

They use simple icons with green graphics to present their company activities.

Tip 4: Showcase your product/services

Highlights are a good way to show Instagram users what you offer.

Check out how Florence by Mills does this. The cosmetics brand crafts eye-catching highlights (that also match their brand colors) to present their products and services.

Tip 5: Use your brand ambassadors

See how Nike Women does that in practice.

The famous footwear corporation includes famous athletes as their brand ambassadors in their main story highlights covers.

The actual covers are a photo of the athlete and the name of the Highlight is her name.

8. How to display Instagram Highlight on your website?

Once you are done crafting your unique Instagram highlights, why not show your creativity on your website too?

Please note that at this moment Instagram does not have an API that will allow third-party tools to directly sync the websites with your Instagram Highlights.

The good news is that there are tools like EmbedStories that can display Instagram stories on any website.

This means that you can embed Instagram Highlights but only for the stories that are already generated in the EmbedStories platform.

The archived stories can be uploaded manually by using the upload option for a custom story that you can later add to your stories Highlights menu.

For any information on how to embed Instagram Highlights on your website, feel free to chat with us.

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In summary, Instagram highlights help brands catch the eye of their followers and keep them engaged in a more creative way.

And from the looks of it, Instagram highlights popularity isn’t going to vanish anytime soon.

Use that wisely!

How to create Instagram Highlights

It's cool that Instagram stories are temporary...until you want them to be permanent.

Allow us to introduce you to Instagram Highlights, which allow you to take content from your Insta Story or archive and put it in its own little "Highlight" section on your profile.

Did anything significant happen that you captured on your Story? Get engaged? Start a new job? Go to a concert? If it's on your Story, you can turn it into a Highlight to look back on when you go to your profile. Here's how to create one.

There are a few different ways you can start, but before we get there, the very first thing you need is an Instagram Story to get your Highlight from. Once you have that, you can access a number of ways to turn it into a Highlight.

1. Go to your profile page and, under "Story Highlights," tap the "+" button to add a Highlight.

Add a Highlight. Credit: screenshot: instagram

or

Go to your profile page and hit the "+" button in the top right corner. Then tap "Story Highlight."

Tap the "+" symbol on the top right, then select "Story Highlight." Credit: screenshot: instagram

Either option will get you to this screen:

The Highlight selection screen Credit: screenshot: instagram

2. Select the piece(s) of your Story you want to become a Highlight, and tap "Next."

3. Edit your cover if you want. Give your Highlight a title, and tap "Add."

Edit your Highlight cover and title it. Credit: screenshot: instagram

4. Your Highlight will now appear on your Instagram profile.

View your Highlight here. Credit: screenshot: instagram

You can also create a Highlight directly from your Story:

1. Go to your Instagram Story.

2. When you get to the frame you want to Highlight, tap "Highlight" on the bottom right.

Tap "Highlight" on the bottom right of the frame you want to Highlight. Credit: screenshot: instagram

3. You can either create a new Highlight with it or add it to another Highlight.

Create a new Highlight or add to another one. Credit: screenshot: instagram

4. If you create a new Highlight, give it a title and tap "Add."

5. If you want to add it to another Highlight, just tap the Highlight you want to add it to — and you're done! That frame will play right after the first frame in your Highlight.

You can view your Highlight collection under your name and bio on your profile page.

View your Highlights here. Credit: screenshot: instagram

One other way to create a Highlight is by accessing your Story Archive.

1. Go to your profile page and tap the menu icon in the top right corner.

2. Tap "Archive" in the menu that comes up.

Create a Highlight from your Archive. Credit: screenshot: instagram

3. Tap a frame from your Archive that you want to turn into a Highlight.

4. See above "create a highlight directly from your Story" and repeat steps 2 through 5.

And that's how Highlights are done. Find a special moment on your Instagram Story (or in your Archive) and Highlight it on your profile for you and your friends to look back on. Happy Highlighting!

How to add zest to the Instagram Stories of a blog or business account: ideas and tricks

Share!

Due to their interactivity, spontaneity and short lifespan, Instagram Stories attract the maximum attention of users. Do not miss this unique chance to win the sympathy of followers, increase their loyalty, or tell in a non-standard way about the arrival of new products.

Do you want to make the most of Stories by promoting your Instagram account with them? In that case, be sure to check out this article - today you will learn how to creatively design stories to increase the engagement of your target audience and beat all competitors. nine0003

Program for promotion on Instagram - SocialKit:

Collecting and filtering the target audience
Masslooking, massfollowing, massliking
Delayed posting of photos, videos and stories
Mailing in Direct, autoresponder

Registration >>>

Read also: Situational marketing is an effective way to promote on Instagram!

A selection of original ideas for Instagram Stories

The advanced functionality of the social network opens up incredible scope for the implementation of creative ideas that your subscribers will surely appreciate.

Layers

If you want to play up an ordinary repost in an interesting way, add a png image as a background to create layering. When choosing a suitable picture, be guided by the theme and mood of the post (it can be flowers, clouds, various ornaments).

We recommend using special collections on photobank sites: save your favorite picture to the gallery, then insert it into your story by adding a sticker. nine0003

Collages

Collages are great for product promotion and are also suitable for entertainment content. For example, you can share stills from your favorite movies, a selection of stylish looks for this fall, or pictures of restaurant dishes that you like with your audience.

Complete the story with suitable music and a caption for more atmosphere.

Article on the topic: Development of a content plan for Instagram Stories

Before/after pictures

This format is suitable for both professionals offering services on Instagram and ordinary bloggers. In the first case, it makes sense to show the result of your work (photo processing, makeup, manicure, etc.), and in the second case, to please the audience with entertaining disappearing posts. For example, you can demonstrate the result of general cleaning in the apartment, trying on a new jacket, handmade from improvised materials.

To build communication with followers, invite them to express their opinion, evaluate the changes you have shown. nine0003

Geometry

A simple yet effective way to spice up Instagram Stories is to add geometric elements to the background: lines, dots, and spots. To draw a neat outline, choose the smallest brush size, and it is best to paint over the object inside with a thicker brush.

This is interesting: Mistakes when creating an AR mask on Instagram and expert advice

GIF animation

For those who want to increase the engagement of subscribers, we recommend adding relevant gifs to stories. For example, when showing a beautiful landscape, you can choose a GIF with the word “magic”, and when advertising a bestseller, you can choose a flashing heart. nine0003

Please note that moving elements can be independently found both by keywords and by the artist's nickname. The best choice would be a GIF that appears, which does not hide important information and does not degrade the quality of the original image.

To-do list

Originally designed lists appeal to many social media users. There are several options here: to voice the real things you have planned for today, or to publish a checklist that is relevant for the target audience, a selection. For example, "TOP 10 TV series this fall", "What you need to do before the New Year", "How to apply for a passport." nine0003

Excursion

Do you often travel to different countries or visit interesting places in your city? Organize an exciting tour of stories for your followers. Post photos and videos with intriguing captions that convey your emotions and tell fun facts.

For a change, you can make your own ratings of the best places, conduct surveys and tests, recommend top places for recreation to the audience.

Now Reading: How to Use Instagram Stories Questions to Your Best Benefits

Quote

Add one or more quotes from your favorite novelists, pop stars, or Hollywood artists to Instagram Stories. To promote the brand, use those replicas that most closely match the values and mission of the company.

3D text

This feature is sure to draw users' attention to your stories!

To create a three-dimensional text effect, write the desired words in different colors and overlay each other to add a kind of shadow. nine0003

Conclusion

Do your best to create compelling and engaging Instagram Stories audiences. Broadcast your values and demonstrate your good taste, every time proving to your followers that you are on the same wavelength with them.

Delayed posting in the SocialKit program will help you focus on the needs of the target audience and high quality content. Thanks to this handy tool, you will save a lot of effort by scheduling the release of the desired disappearing publications at a certain time in advance. nine0003

Useful articles:

How to run effective Instagram Stories ads: step by step guide + ideas and tips
Promotion on Instagram through SocialKit using mass following, mass looking and mass liking
How to set up Instagram welcome messages with SocialKit

How to make a beautiful Instagram feed

June 25, 2022

Instagram is a great platform for promotion. And here a lot depends on what impression the profile makes: what is the general mood, color palette and combination of photos. We have put together a few tips to help you make a beautiful ribbon and develop a special brand aesthetic.

A single style is those details that unite the entire visual. For example, it can be a photo style - dark deep, airy light photos. Or the paraphernalia of the frame - rustic, vintage, kinfolk and others. Even some common character or object. However, in search of your own style, it is not at all necessary to drive yourself into rigid frames and lock yourself in one direction. You can combine completely different photos if you follow a few rules. nine0003

Decide on the mood of the profile

The account itself does not affect sales. For visitors to turn into potential customers, they need to be impressed. Think about what emotions you want to evoke in subscribers? The style of your feed and the choice of photos will depend on this.

For example, if you are selling home decor, a hygge aesthetic would be appropriate: candles and cozy blankets in the photos, warm colors and soft shadows in the processing. And for premium leather goods, you can try shooting with gloomy light and deep hues - if you place all the accents correctly, such shots will be filled with a special atmosphere. nine0003

Accounts of photographers can also be different: on the left - conciseness and rigor, on the right - brightness and audacity. For example, photos of @neekmason and @kavalerchikyana are used

Choose primary colors and shades

When one color is used in the profile - everything is light and airy or vice versa dark - it looks very stylish and beautiful. But after a while, when you see the fifth, tenth or hundredth such photo, you stop seeing the difference. Therefore, we recommend leaving the stereotype that it is enough to choose one filter for all photos in the past. nine0003

It's much better not to lock your creativity in some kind of filter, but simply choose your favorite shades of base colors and make sure that they are regularly in photographs. If you are shooting portraits, ensure that the skin is the same color throughout. If you publish landscapes, the shades of the sky and greenery should also be the same. Then the shots taken in different conditions will remain natural and look harmonious.

On the left is an example of a tape in which each photo individually is very beautiful, but together they look very similar. And on the right is a tape in which the frames are very different, but thanks to the primary colors that are repeated from frame to frame, the tape looks harmonious. For example, photos of @meghan_faulk and @prostokrasivo. wear are used

Make smooth transitions from dark to light shots

You can combine dark and light, warm and cold shots in one profile - just make smooth transitions. For example, if you had three light shots and now you want to post a dark photo, post a light photo with dark accents first. Then it turns out that some shades seem to flow into others. Such a “gradient” looks beautiful in the feed and will help to fit photos of your customers into it.

Instagram Kinfolk is a great example of a harmonious feed without a single filter. This is achieved by smooth transitions and playing with color. Photos used as an example @kinfolk

Don't be afraid to add color accents

Color brings zest to photos and encourages you to come in and see the details. This is due to the fact that our eye easily picks up bright spots, especially when looking at photos from the phone.

Therefore, for profiles in neutral tones, such as gray or beige, we recommend adding bright details so that the tape does not look boring. And if your frames are bright and colorful, on the contrary, it is better to add calm objects - this way there will be no extra variegation when looking at the tape. nine0003

Color attracts the eye, the main thing is to use it in doses. For example, on a neutral background - white, black, beige. Photographs @la_maison.n and @gkstories were used as an example

Alternate wide and close-ups

The feed looks more harmonious when photos with different scales are published side by side. For example, if you have an online clothing store, you can first post a photo of a girl in a full-length dress, then a waist-length portrait, and then a large photo with a dress back or a beautiful clasp. So there will be no feeling that you are repeating yourself. nine0003

The alternation of plans helps to make the tape varied and lively. The characters in the photographs change, the surrounding world changes - then the tape looks eventful.

Cozymoss Instagram photos at different scales.