You’ve created a few Instagram Highlights themes (those little bubbles at the top of your profile), designed some great cover images for them, and they’re sitting there on your profile so neatly. Now how do you add to them?
Instagram stories are a great opportunity for brands to add more “in the moment” content to their profiles without concerns around aesthetic consistency and possibly ruining a well thought-out content structure. But, as we all know, these stories disappear after 24 hours, and sometimes there’s some real gold in there that you want to save. This is where the Highlights come in – with the right setup, you can save your great stories posts to your Highlights to ensure they have everlasting life.
Remember, your Instagram Highlights are one of the first things that a new visitor to your profile will see – you want to make sure that they are an excellent representation of what a follower can expect from you in terms of content. They are also an excellent space to share groupings of content – like your catalogue of products, or your suite of services, your epic shoe collection or even your store locations. If it’s important information and you’ve run out of room in your bio – Highlights are your next best spot!
Here are a couple of easy-to-follow steps to make the most out of your Instagram stories and Highlights:
Step 1: Ensure you are archiving your Instagram stories
- From your profile, tap on the settings icon (little cog, top right) to get to your Instagram settings
- Scroll down to “story controls”
- Under the “Saving” section, ensure that “Save to archive” is on
Step 2: Adding to your Instagram stories
- Tap that little camera icon at the top left of your Instagram home screen
- Take a photo, and add any text, stickers or scribbles that you’d like. In my example you can see I added the mention sticker for Brand Candy (@brandcandystudio)
- When you’re happy with your post, tap the little plus button in the circle at the bottom of your screen “Your Story” – which adds this post to your story feed
Step 3: Update your Instagram Highlight with stories from the archive
- Head on back to your profile, and tap on the Highlight that you’d like to add to. I selected the “Brand Candy” Highlight
- Tap on the little triple dot “More” option at the bottom right of your screen
- From the resulting menu, tap “Edit Highlight”
- Here you get to uncheck/remove any stories posts from the Highlight (under Highlighted tab), or, for today’s tutorial, add new stories by tapping “Archive”
- Once you’ve tapped “Archive” you’ll be presented with all the most recent stories that have been archived.
- Select the story or stories that you’d like to add to the Highlight (you can see I’ve selected the story from above) and then tap “Done”
And that’s it! If you need a bit more help on producing great content for your Instagram followers, head on over to our article “How to beef up your content and increase your Instagram followers“. And as always, if you need some consultation on improving your brand’s social media presence, be sure to get in touch.
