How to highlight on instagram

Introducing Stories Highlights & Stories Archive

December 05, 2017

Today we’re introducing two new tools that let you hold on to your favorite moments from Instagram Stories and share them in ways that help you express yourself. Stories Highlights is a new part of your profile where you can express more of who you are through stories you’ve shared. And to help you build highlights, your stories will now automatically save into a private Stories Archive so you can easily relive them whenever you want.

Stories Highlights

Over the past year, Instagram Stories has become a key part of how you express yourself — but there hasn’t been an easy way to keep your stories around for more than 24 hours. Now you can more fully express your identity by grouping stories you’ve shared into highlights and featuring them on your profile.

Stories Highlights appear in a new section on your profile below your bio. To create a highlight, tap the “New” circle at the far left. From there, you can choose any stories from your archive, select a cover for your highlight and give it a name. Once you’re done, your highlight will appear as a circle on your profile that plays as a stand-alone story when someone taps it. Highlights stay on your profile until you remove them, and you can have as many highlights as you’d like. To edit or remove a highlight, just tap and hold that highlight on your profile.

Story Highlights lets you show all the sides of your personality, and you can make highlights out of anything you’ve shared to your story in the past. From the best moments of your ongoing soccer season to all the stories you capture of your loved ones, the interests and activities that matter most to you have a home right on your profile.

Stories Archive

Moving forward, your stories will automatically save to your archive when they expire. This makes it easy for you to revisit your favorite moments later on or bring them back to life in a highlight.

To access the stories in your archive, tap the Archive icon on your profile. From there, you can easily switch between your Posts Archive and your new Stories Archive. In your Stories Archive, your stories will appear in a grid with the most recent stories at the bottom. The first story from each day will show a date indicator to help you navigate your archive as you scroll.

Tap on any story in your archive to watch it. From there, you can add it to your story, share it as a post or add it to a highlight on your profile.

Only you can see your archived stories, and you can choose to turn off auto-archiving at any time in your profile settings.

To learn more about Stories Highlights and Stories Archive, check out the Instagram Help Center.

Today’s updates are available as part of Instagram version 25 on iOS and Android.

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 stand out on Instagram in 2020: 3 effective ways

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Today, everyone is a content creator. Its quantity is simply prohibitive. It's getting harder and harder to stand out. But still it is possible, and in this article we will talk about three proven ways not to get lost, but on the contrary, to attract attention on Instagram.

Interactive stories

Every day, 500 million people post stories on Instagram. Therefore, it is less and less likely to stand out among them. Therefore, you need to take a non-standard and distinctive approach to their creation. So, at a minimum, it is worth creating interactive stories. That is, the subscriber should have a desire to click something.

Instagram itself offers a wide range of such opportunities. In particular, you can add polls, music, stickers, polls, quizzes, and more. And if you post a regular picture, then the person will quickly swipe further and forget about it. In turn, the algorithms will understand that your content does not interest the audience. At the same time, if the subscriber has pressed some button, then he is already in the game and interacting with your content. Algorithms will appreciate it.

The ideal option is stories reposts. There is a very good example from the streaming platform Netflix. They made a questionnaire, which consists of four questions. However, they decided not to insert the standard questionnaire that Instagram offers. Instead, they made their own design for the questionnaires, and the user needs to repost the Netflix story with the questionnaire and enter their answer options there.

Make your own AR filter , any effect, inscription. They are very popular among social network users. However, it should be understood that the brand and the company do not need to make just what kind of product. If you decide to create an AR filter, then you need to do it with the highest quality. People should be interested in using your mask, adding it and sharing it with friends and their followers.

We have already written about how to use masks for Instagram.

There are two options here. The filter must be funny - then it will become viral. Or as cool as possible, thanks to which it can be in the tops of the best filters.⠀

Authentic videos

Few people are interested in classic commercials. Yes, they still work and perform their main functions. Yes, they can be as creative as possible. However, people do not want to see the same videos on their Instagram feed that they see while watching TV or before watching YouTube videos.

On Instagram, they want to see the real picture, the real product as it is in real life, and the faces of the brand should look and talk into the front camera, and not be filmed in professional photo shoots. Although this may also be necessary.

Your videos don't have to be cool and expensive. After all, now everyone is trying to rent cooler and more expensive. Therefore, showing something real and authentic is a really good way to stand out among the crowd of licked content.

How to create an Instagram profile and stand out from the competition

Instagram is no longer just a place where people share their photos with their followers. Instagram is now a powerful business platform. Thousands of small shops are born here every month, some of them grow into big brands. Thousands of popular personal blogs that bring their owners good money from advertising integrations. However, it is almost impossible to achieve high results and gain a large number of subscribers without a thoughtful design and high-quality photos. An Instagram profile should be catchy. In this article, we will show you how to create a branded, memorable style for your Instagram account.

Among hundreds of thousands of Instagram accounts, it is yours that should say to random users: “Look, this is interesting! It’s not like everyone here!” That is why you need to develop a corporate identity profile. In the example below, you can see that half of the photos show geometry and a large number of fruits and vegetables. If you open the profile, then this feature is visible even better. Ordinary photos of food are not interesting to anyone, but if you choose the angle, process the photo, you can safely go and win the attention of users.

Create an account logo. When opening your profile, the first thing the user sees is the logo. It should be something simple, but at the same time memorable. If the account is a personal blog, then try to take an interesting photo in an unusual setting for everyone. For example, in the logo below in the photo with a man there is a penguin. It is unlikely that many will find something like this. If the profile is dedicated to a company, then use the company logo.

Write a short text about yourself or your company. List what you do so that the next new profile visitor, after reading the description, immediately understands who you are. For example: We are the best confectionery factory in St. Petersburg. “Come to us at confectionery factory.ru and see for yourself :)”. Add contacts or links to your resources, such as a personal site.

No one will see the logo and description without a good photo. Instagram works according to the following principle:

Profile photos are included in recommended users.
A person opens a photo he likes, then goes to the profile and subscribes if the account interests him.

Therefore, it is important to pay special attention to the picture. It is she who is able to bring you new subscribers and potential buyers. For photos to be of high quality, they must be processed in a photo editor.

There are many editors. There are both free ones that provide a minimum of services, and expensive professional ones that will harm ordinary users without good training rather than help. Therefore, we will focus on the golden mean - Movavi Photo Editor 5.

Using the Movavi 5 photo editor, you can easily edit your photos so that the picture becomes bright, high-quality and attracts users. All the basic tools are present here and there are no useless ones. With Movavi Photo Editor you can:

Add and customize effects;
Remove unwanted objects from photos;
Perform background replacement;
Trim excess;
Add text;
Work with faces.

The program interface is very friendly. To use the desired tool, select it from the top toolbar. The settings menu will open on the right. The example above shows how to work with color, brightness and other parameters to improve the quality of a photo. Move the sliders for the best result. Do not be afraid to experiment, all changes can be canceled using the "cancel" and "reset changes" buttons.

Most of the photos on Instagram are photos of people. Movavi Photo Editor has a huge set of face tools. So you can remove wrinkles, eliminate shine, get rid of red eyes or make your skin clearer. In addition, the program has tools for adding makeup. Use tools like eye shadow, mascara, eyebrow pencil, and more.

“Photo Enhance” and “Retouch (Face)” are the two main tools that account users will need to process photos. However, don't forget to experiment with "object removal" and "background replacement".