How to Use Instagram Story Highlights

Instagram Highlights can be a powerful tool for marketing the businesses however, you need to be strategic about what content to share and how to promote your brand. There are many creative ways to incorporate the Highlights feature into your Instagram marketing strategy but the main goal is to create value, develop trust with your audience and drive traffic to the website.

So let’s start from the beginning, shall we? What are these Instagram Story Highlights that everyone talks about, and why are they so popular?

Story Highlights are a group of stories divided into separate ‘folder sections’ on your Instagram profile. Unlike regular stories that you can only see for 24 hours, Story Highlights can be seen anytime with no time limit and they can be found right under your profile bio. This way anyone can easily access all the content you want people to see first whether it’s your followers or new potential followers and highlight what’s your brand about. Story Highlights are a very creative way of sharing the most important topics with your following. Therefore, if there is any important information that people want to find, they can access it through the highlights.

How to Create Story Highlights

Before you use the Instagram Stories Highlights feature, you need to learn how to create them. So let me take you through 4 main steps of this process:

Step 1: The first very important step is to turn on Instagram’s Auto-Archiving Feature, which enables your stories to be automatically saved! No more worrying about losing your content after 24 hours! Content will be ‘archived’ and you can access it anytime. You can also save live stories right after you create one, just hit the Highlights button and it will be saved straight into one of your themed Highlights.

Step 2: The next step is to create your customized Instagram Story Highlights to complement your overall look and brand. Create separate highlights for each topic you want to include; For example, highlighting products/services you offer, reviews, interests or other themes like travels and specific countries you visited. Make it easy for your followers to clearly know where to go if they are looking for something specific, like promo codes or tips for being a digital nomad.

Step 3: After you decide what content to include, name the Highlights according to its theme and create a cover photo for each of them. You can use the palette of your brand colors or icons that best describe each Highlight, and make sure to keep the name short. Try to avoid using text in cover photos just because it’s not very aesthetic and the text will be small and hard to read. There are several tools for creating cover photos, but I love using Canva which is easy to use and StoryArt has some really nice icons, too!

Step 4: Lastly, make sure to keep the most important topics first because only the first 4 Highlights will be viewed under your profile bio. The rest will be still there but won’t be seen straight away when looking at your profile. But don’t worry! You can edit, add, and remove Highlights whenever you feel like there is a need for it. This way you can ensure, the Highlights are up to date and you are telling an ongoing story but also keeping your previous activities, so new followers can see some of it.

By using these 4 steps, you will create a nice-looking Instagram Story Highlights and make it easy for your followers to find content about the most important things related to your brand in one place.

I would love to hear from you! Let me know how you categorized your story highlights and what tools are your favorite!