Instagram Highlights: What Are They & How to Use Them?

Instagram highlights are collections of stories you want permanently featured on your profile. When you create one, it’ll always be visible to your followers, just like standard posts, unless you manually remove it. In the meantime, you can edit it, change the Instagram story selection, and tweak its cover photo.

In this article, we’ll get more familiar with this feature, provide a few Instagram highlight ideas, and go through the process of creating and editing them step by step.

What Are Instagram Highlights & Why Are They Important?

Instagram highlights are a feature that allows you to categorize your stories by theme and keep them on your profile for more than 24 hours. In fact, they can stay there indefinitely if you don’t decide to remove them at some point.

Instagram highlight icons look similar to regular stories—they’re tappable circles that reveal photos or short videos when you open them. However, unlike regular stories, they’re located below your bio section—right above your photo/video grid.

You can highlight a story (add it to an existing highlight or create a new one) as soon as you publish it or select one or more from your Instagram archive.

Since their introduction in 2017, Instagram highlights have been a game changer for both personal and business profiles. According to a Facebook survey, 62% of people take more interest in a product or brand if they see it in stories.

Thanks to Instagram highlights, your content can now be on display non-stop, acting as a unique homepage for your brand and attracting more potential clients. However, these highlights aren’t meant just for business accounts; they can help you enhance engagement with your followers even if you have a private profile.

How to Create Instagram Highlights

Now that we’ve covered the meaning and purpose of Instagram highlights, let’s see how to create them step by step, whether you’re highlighting a current story or choosing from the archive.

Highlighting a Current Story

• Open your story: Tap on the circle around your profile picture to open your story. From there, tap the Highlight option in the lower right corner.

• Create a new highlight: At this point, you’ll see the selection of your existing Instagram highlights (if you have any) and an option titled New at the end of the row. When you select it, you’ll see a preview of your story in a circle. Under it, there will be a space for your Instagram highlight name. You can leave it blank or title it with words or emojis.
• Add the story: Once you’re happy with the title, click the blue Add button, and your story will be highlighted on your profile.

Highlighting an Archived Story

• Open your archive: When you log into your account, tap on your profile picture in the lower right corner to access your profile. From there, click on the three lines in the upper right corner and choose archive.
• Select stories archive: The Instagram archive contains stories, posts, and live archives. To access your old stories, open the drop-down menu at the top of the screen and select the relevant option.

• Choose a story: You can browse all your stories or filter them by date or location. When you find the one you want to highlight, the process is the same as with newly published stories.

What Are Instagram Highlight Covers & How to Create Them?

Instagram highlight covers are the pictures that serve as teasers for your collections of stories. Their purpose is to provide highlight previews and intrigue the audience, prompting them to click and view your content and emphasizing the style and branding of your business.

When you create a highlight, Instagram automatically sets the first story in the collection as the cover. However, you can also select the cover yourself, depending on the message you want your highlight to convey.

Moreover, you can get creative and have fun with the colors to accentuate them even further. For example, Instagram highlights in black and white can stand out quite well on a profile full of colorful pictures and reels.

Let’s see how you can choose an Instagram highlight cover in a few simple steps:

• Edit cover: When you select the stories you want in your highlight and click Next, you’ll see a circle previewing the first story in the collection. Tap on Edit cover below it, and you’ll see an image icon and all the selected stories at the bottom of the screen.
• Choose a story or picture: At this point, you can choose one of the selected stories or choose a picture from your gallery and set it as your highlight cover.

• Adjust the cover: Once you’re happy with your choice, adjust the cover within the circle and tap Done in the upper right corner.

If you want to edit the cover of an already published highlight, hold your finger pressed on the relevant circle and tap on Edit highlight. From there, follow the same instructions as if you were just creating the highlight.

5 Best Practices for Using Instagram Highlights

Now that you know the basics, let’s see how successful content creators use Instagram highlights.

#1. Highlight Your Events and Announcements

Instagram highlights are perfect for promoting recurring or upcoming events and pinning important announcements to your profile.

Posts get lost in the feed, and stories vanish after 24 hours, so you have the best chance of increasing the number of attendees at your events by highlighting them. As a result, your brand will gain more traction, which will secure more events.

Additionally, you can highlight the events you don’t host but plan to attend to emphasize your brand’s mission and showcase what it’s all about.

Highlighting announcements is another great way to engage your audiences and keep them updated. Giveaways, milestones, and improvements related to your brand are just some of the news you can share with your followers.

#2. Answer Follower Questions

Answering your followers’ questions can benefit your brand in several ways. For starters, it can clarify the details your audience is interested in, decrease the number of questions in direct messages, and streamline your business processes.

Additionally, it can help you connect with your followers, ultimately increasing their engagement with your content.

You can start by creating a story with the Question sticker. When the questions come in, either record yourself answering them all or make individual stories with answers in writing. From there, categorize them all into an FAQ highlight.

#3. Share Educational Content

Educational content, whether it’s recipes, tutorials, or explainer videos, can do wonders for your brand. In addition to providing information to your followers, it helps paint your brand in a professional light, broadening your target audiences and keeping them engaged.

Creating educational stories and compiling them into highlights with regular updates provides your followers with a constant source of information they can engage with and share long after the 24-hour story-time period.

You can boost your brand’s visibility even further if you get creative and add customized stickers to your educational highlights. Your followers can then share them on their stories, effectively notifying more people about your content and bringing you more traffic.

#4. Share Fun Content

While your content should bring educational or informational value to your followers, you can occasionally take a break from that and create something fun simply to engage your audience.

Creating an Instagram highlight with random entertaining stories that don’t belong anywhere else is a great starting point. From there, you can periodically post fun content on your stories, updating the highlight as you do so.

The options are numerous, ranging from trivia to quizzes and tests. The important thing to remember is that as long as you have fun creating content, your target audience will resonate and engage with it.

#5. Highlight Your Target Audience’s Interests

Increasing reach and engagement requires delivering content your target audience is most interested in. To find out what that is, you can track the Instagram metrics for each of your posts and see which ones have the most views, likes, comments, and shares.

Another way is by directly asking your followers what they want to see on your profile. You can do that by creating a poll and providing a few options from which they can choose. Alternatively, you can use the Question sticker on your stories and have your followers offer their own suggestions.

Instagram Highlights for Business

As previously mentioned, Instagram stories are likely to engage 62% more people than regular posts. Naturally, this means that Instagram highlights can enhance the reach of content and the audience’s engagement, driving more people to your business account.

Let’s see how you can use this feature for your brand to gain traction:

• Showcase products: Instagram highlights are perfect for promoting your products and services. Not only will they reach more people, but they will also provide essential information about your offerings. From there, you can direct clients to your official website or prompt them to make a purchase through Instagram.
• Highlight business information: All the information about your business, including opening hours, return policy, pricing, mission statement, and menu, can find their place in Instagram highlights. That way, you can save both your and your customers’ time by eliminating the need for inquiries through direct messages.
• Share client testimonials: Satisfied customers are likely to share their positive experiences with a business in their Instagram stories. You can use that to your advantage and highlight their testimonials on your profile.
• Offer a peek behind the scenes: A great way to connect with your followers is to share the behind-the-scenes pictures and videos related to your business. They can include the creation of products, packing up orders, and introduction of your employees.

How to Promote Instagram Highlights

While creating an Instagram highlight is a fairly simple endeavor, there are some tips and tricks to help you promote them to expand your reach. Here are some of them:

• Use hashtags and location tags: Hashtags and location tags can make your stories (and, by extension, highlights) more visible. That raises your chances of reaching your potential followers, who may come across your content while searching for a related tag.
• Send traffic to your website: Instagram stories and highlights can be a gateway to your website, where potential clients can learn more about your brand. Use them to draw your people’s attention to the link in your bio section until you reach 10,000 followers. At that point, you can use the swipe-up feature to redirect your followers directly to your website.
• Update Instagram highlights: You want to stay at the top of your followers’ feeds, so make sure to post new stories and add them to your highlights regularly. Using scheduling tools like Publer to schedule a lot of stories in advance can help ensure you always have a selection of stories to choose from, and do it frequently to keep your highlights fresh.

Key Takeaways

• Instagram highlights are collections of stories that can stay on your profile indefinitely, unlike standard stories.
• You can create an Instagram highlight with a newly published story or select some of the expired ones from the archive.
• An Instagram highlight cover can be a preview of any story in the collection or a picture from your device’s gallery.
• Some of the best practices for using Instagram highlights include sharing educational content, answering followers’ questions, and categorizing your events and announcements.
• Instagram highlights can help you drive traffic to your website and boost your business or personal brand by increasing your profile reach and engagement.

Ervin Kalemi

Founder & CEO

With over 10 years of experience in software development, entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and social media, I strive every day to bring the best solutions that will empower your business's online presence. Currently working on Publer and Kibo.