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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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:
Note that, once you create the Highlights they appear in your Instagram profile screen right below your bio text and profile photo.
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How to Create Instagram Highlight?As mentioned above, you have two ways how to create an Instagram Story Highlights:
Let me show you how to create a Highlight with the first option:
If you have an active story and you want to make sure this story is added to a Highlight just follow these steps:
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.
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:
You can add more photos or videos to your highlight at any time by following these steps:
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’.
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:
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.
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:
Once you want to change the cover, just choose this icon from your phone’s camera roll.
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.
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 versaWhen 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 highlightsTake 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 colorsTo 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/servicesHighlights 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.
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.
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!
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
Tap the "+" symbol on the top right, then select "Story Highlight." Credit: screenshot: instagram
The Highlight selection screen Credit: screenshot: instagram
Edit your cover if you want. Give your Highlight a title, and tap "Add."Edit your Highlight cover and title it. Credit: screenshot: instagram
View your Highlight here. Credit: screenshot: instagram
Tap "Highlight" on the bottom right of the frame you want to Highlight. Credit: screenshot: instagram
Create a new Highlight or add to another one. Credit: screenshot: instagram
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.View your Highlights here. Credit: screenshot: instagram
Create a Highlight from your Archive. Credit: screenshot: instagram
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!
The Highlights on Instagram feature allows you to save stories in a special archive that will be available only to you, and later create collections from them that are available to everyone. This feature appeared on December 5, 2017, and since then has been actively used by bloggers, companies as part of the Instagram promotion .
Before Highlights, stories on the social network were saved for only 24 hours. The new feature allowed users not only to save stories to revisit later, but also to create compilations of the best moments and share them with friends. nine0005
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Story Highlights - actual stories - displayed in the description of the user's profile. You can add an unlimited number of stories to each new collection.
All of them will be displayed as normal stories, in chronological order.
Simultaneously with the Highlights feature, Instagram introduced automatic saving of stories. Now, after 24 hours, they do not disappear, but are moved to the archive - they can be shared, reviewed later, or added to the collection. You can add to collections stories saved in the archive, that is, created after December 5, 2017. nine0005
To create a new collection, upload multiple stories, from one to infinity. Read more about using Stories in our article. Once downloaded, go to your profile and click the "new" button in the Highlights section.
You will see a window with all saved stories. Select any of them in the order you would like later when displaying the Highlights compilation. Select the cover of the collection from the thumbnails of the story. Then write the name - it can contain up to 16 characters with spaces.
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Important: by default, the cover of the new album is the image of the first story, cropped to the center. You can change the story that will become the cover and its centering.
After adding the stories, cover and title, save the new highlights . They will appear in your profile description and will be available to all users who visit your page. Collections will appear as normal stories. Their number is not limited - you can add 10, 20 or 100 "best moments", blog categories, product descriptions. nine0005
The Highlights feature can be used for promotion. Browse competitor profiles and use their experience or develop your own original ideas. For example, you can:
This is true for shops on Instagram. By adding the description and benefits of each product to a separate collection, you systematize the information and make the search more convenient. nine0044 
Read also: How to change your Instagram information
Published Highlights can be edited or deleted. To change or delete them, go to your profile, tap on the desired collection and hold your finger on the screen until a pop-up window appears. Choose the option you need - edit or delete. nine0005
In edit mode, you can change the name of the collection, its cover, add another story to the best moments. You can also delete from the "best moments" of history that have lost their relevance.
Article in the topic: How to make covers for current stories on Instagram
In the delete mode, the system will ask you again if you really want to delete the published album. If you confirm the operation, it is permanently deleted. But the stories published in it are saved in the archive - you can create a new collection from them. Also, you can download any Stories from the Highlights section.
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Old app
If you haven't updated Instagram in a while, the feature won't work. To be able to use Highlights, please update the app to version 25 or later.
System crash
If you have the latest version of the app and still don't have Highlights, try reinstalling or restarting it.
Important: if neither updating nor reinstalling helped, write to the technical support service of the social network. nine0005
Do you use Highlights, and what stories do you upload to collections? Share your experience in the comments - we are very interested.
We also recently wrote about the appearance of gifs on Instagram and subscriptions to the hashtags .
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Highlights on Instagram or actual (pinned) Stories appeared quite recently, but are already actively used by many commercial accounts. Highlights allowed to significantly expand the content of the header business profiles on Instagram .
The information that does not fit in the profile description or is relevant in connection with any holiday (February 23, March 8), can now be placed just below the description in the form of pinned Stories.
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Highlights are located below the description and above the content posted in the account (marked as Hot for account owners).
Displayed only on the main profile page.
Most often used to post a price list, answer frequently asked questions, highlight current promotions, present new products, and so on. They are a set of Stories collected in one album, with an arbitrary name. nine0005
To make a pinned story, add a regular story. We talked about how to do this in an article about Instagram Stories .
After publishing a Story, open it and click on the heart icon, then confirm that you want to highlight the story.
The second way to add a pinned story is from the main page of the account by clicking on the big plus. After that, you can select any of the previously published Stories or create a new one. Having marked the necessary Stories, then we come up with a name for the collection and click "Finish". nine0005
The album cover will be selected automatically, but you can change it by clicking "Edit Cover" and selecting any of the Stories in the collection as the cover.
After the done manipulations, the created collection will appear in the "Actual" section in your profile.
Surely, while you were reading our ideas, an insight came to you and you came up with at least a few more ways to use the Highlights function. nine0005
Cool video ideas for Instagram
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