How to make a story 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.

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Introducing New Ways to Collaborate and Create with Reels

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 add and change Instagram highlights correctly

Stories on Instagram* live only a day, but they can be returned using albums (highlights). This is convenient if you don’t want to forget valuable shots and important moments in life, and it’s also useful for work: with the help of albums, you can create thematic headings. A list of such ideas can be found in the article “15+ Ideas for Instagram* Highlights that anyone can implement”.

In this article we will analyze the technical part: how to add, change and hide stories from the current one. nine0003

How to add Stories to Instagram Stories*

You can add both recent Stories and previously released Stories to Stories.

How to put the actual on Instagram *:

We publish stories.
We return to the feed of publications.
Click "Select" on the published story.
Select an album to save or create a new one (see below for creating albums).
Stories are saved to Topical. nine0018

Adding new stories to the current one

How to add stories from the archive to the current one:

1. Go to your personal tab in the Instagram app*. Click "Add" in the feed under the profile header.

2. Select the stories you want to add to the album. The number is not limited, one story can be added to several albums at once. As you choose, click "Next".

How to add old stories to current

3. Edit the cover art and name it . The maximum title length is 16 characters. You can use numbers, symbols, and emoji. For the cover, you can use frames from stories uploaded to the album, or click on the gallery icon to select images from your phone.

Instagram* In any case, write down the name, so if you don't want a signature, then use an invisible space - copy it from here, it is between the brackets (⠀).

Important : Create icon covers if you want to style your profile in the same style. For more details, see the articles “How to make a cover for Instagram* Highlights Stories” and “How to make an Instagram highlight*: instructions and tricks”.

Greenfield, Inostranka and Leroy Merlin highlight cover design options

4. Click Finish . The current one is saved in your profile and is available for viewing by subscribers. Unfortunately, Stories view statistics will no longer be displayed in the current one. nine0003 Keeping up-to-date on Instagram*

Is it possible to add up-to-date on Instagram* without stories? No, you won't be able to upload a picture or video from the gallery right away - you'll have to create a story anyway.

How to edit Instagram highlights*

How to edit Instagram highlights*:

1. Click on highlights . Next, click on the “More” item in the lower right corner and select “Edit current”. By the way, in the same menu you can delete a specific story from the album, send it to friends in direct, copy the link or share it through other social networks. nine0003

2. Change Actual . Two tabs will appear: in the "Selected" you can click on stories and remove unnecessary ones, in the "Add" tab, respectively, add saved stories from the archive.

Edit highlights

3. Change title and cover . The actions are exactly the same as when creating covers and captions, which we described above.

4. Click "Finish" . Current edited.

Adding new stories, changing the cover in highlights

How to rearrange what's hot on Instagram*

There's no official way to change the order of what's hot on Instagram*, but the app keeps the order of albums according to the editing date. To swap highlights, just edit the desired album and it will automatically move forward.

Go to the current and click "More", then - "Edit current".
Go to the "Add" tab and select any story, the date is not important. nine0018
The album has moved forward.

So, with the help of simple manipulations, you can build the desired order of the albums.

Changing the order of the current in Instagram*

Important: when deleting stories from the current in edit mode, the order of the albums will not change.

How to hide Instagram highlights*

On Instagram* you can hide stories from users and show them only to your close circle. The list can be customized - as a result, only those who are part of the group will see stories. This also applies to the present. nine0003

How to make relevant for friends:
1. Add stories . Choose the place of publication: "Close friends".
2. Adding friends . We make a list of those who will see the story - you can add from one person.

Publish stories for friends

3. Go to the feed . We select "Select" and create a new album: we prescribe the name and edit the cover, if necessary.

Add stories for friends to the current

4. Done . Now only friends from the list will see this album. For comparison, in the screenshot below: in the first picture, this is how a friend’s list of highlights looks like, and in the second, for someone who is not on the list.

How friends see their profile on Instagram*

There is another way to hide stories and highlights from a specific person.

How to hide stories and current from another user:

1. Go to "Settings" . Select the "Privacy" section. nine0003

2. Select "Stories". Next, specify the accounts of those people who do not need to show your stories.

Closing stories and current from users

3. Done . Now the selected people will not show your stories and current.

What does a profile look like with hidden stories and the current one

In conclusion

We plan to release stories in SMMplanner

Have you figured out the current one? Now it only remains to publish stories and scatter them into categories. Well, our SMMplanner service will help you plan the release of stories - you can add stickers, do polls, change backgrounds and connect Canva to create designs. This is convenient if you often publish content and do not want to be intrusive - the scheduler will help you create a publishing plan at least a month in advance. nine0003

13 cool features of Instagram Stories - SMM

1. Find out how many people shared your post in stories

You can find out this data, which is not shown in the statistics, by going to the post itself and clicking on the three dots. There should appear the item “view reposts of stories”. nine0003

If you don't see it, it means that there are currently no active stories with reposts of your publication.

This feature will help you understand how users react to content or determine how much they like a new product from their comments on the repost.

2.Insert image

Copy images directly from the camera roll on your phone.

Just click “copy” and then go to instagram, open the story, press and hold your finger until the “paste” option appears. nine0003

Or download the Google Gboard keyboard and insert images directly from the search.

3. Turn live

into a photo boomerang

This life hack is the least known of our list.

But to make a boomerang, you just need to upload a live photo to your story, press hard on the screen and hold your finger until “boomerang” appears on the screen.

You can return a photo to a static original in the same way.

4. Fill the font with a gradient

Do you want the color of the text to stop being just monotonous?

It is enough to select the written text, select the initial color and at the same time (with both hands) swipe to the left over the text and the color scale.

5. Add glowing emoji effect

Open the text tool and select the neon font. Then choose any emoji. Everything is ready!

In this simple way, you can make the story look more original and make emoji play in a new way. nine0003

6. Add custom fonts to stories

To make this feature available, you will first need to download the Over application (available in the AppStore and Google play).

After installing the application, you can download fonts in OTF format to your phone from your computer by transferring them via Airdrop.

7.Align any font to the right or left

For some fonts, such as classic or typewriter, this feature is available automatically. nine0003

But when you switch to a modern or neon font, this button disappears. However, a simple swipe across the screen to the left or right side will fix the situation.

8.Fill effect

Do you want to make a solid background? Easy!

Upload or take any photo, select the brush tool, click anywhere on the screen and hold until the screen is the color you want.

By the way, this problem can also be solved using the “marker” tool, however, then the background will be translucent. nine0003

And with the help of an eraser, you can later make an interesting pattern.

9. Hide hashtags

Hashtags in stories increase reach, but can spoil the overall picture. There are two ways to hide them:

Make them as small as possible and cover them with a gif.
Use the eyedropper to select a background color and paint your hashtags with it.

10.Create a text shadow effect

This effect is very easy to achieve. nine0003

Write your text. Then copy the text, and make another inscription of the same size, but in a different color.

Lay them on top of each other with a slight offset. Ready!

11. Share multiple answers to your question sticker at once

To do so, click share the answer, download the story and upload it as an image when you share the next one.

Repeat until you have shared all the answers you want.

12. Attach text or GIF so that it appears on your video at the right time

Did you know that you can not only overlay elements on the video in the story, but also choose the moment when they appear?

To do this, click on the text (gif) and hold it until a slider appears at the bottom.