The beauty of Instagram stories is that even once they disappear after their 24 hours is up, Highlights give you the ability to keep your stories up on your profile. This is done by choosing them from your archive and categorising them into groups. This feature makes it really easy for you to organise your Instagram stories and keep them in segments that are clear to your follower. See the way Social Media Influencer and Love Island runner up, Molly-Mae Hague, used highlights to separate her holiday stories.
They mean what they say though. As a business, keep your highlights to actual highlights. Make sure you aren’t putting up every single thing on there and keep it to the best bits. Not everything that goes up on your story has to go into a highlight. In fact, you don’t have to use your highlights at all but they are a great way to feature your best posts and help your follower/prospective customer get right to what they want to see. Think of them as a movie trailer to the rest of your Instagram feed (and your entire business); they market what there is to come and what the user/follower can expect to see more of.
The first one is likely to be the one that viewers will look at straight away, so make sure your very first post captures the viewer and that it shows them what your page is about. A good idea would be to make this an introduction to your company/team. You could add a bit of personality to your feed by introducing followers to your team in this highlight. Or it could be an ‘About’ highlight like the page you would have on your website. It’s important to remember though, the order of these highlights actually appear in the most recently edited order, so whatever you edited last will come up first to your page viewers. However, you may not want these in any particular order or system which is also fine, so long as they don’t need to show up chronologically or structurally in order.
On these Instagram highlights, you can add up to 100 photos and or videos. Whilst there is a limit on the number of clips you add, there is no limit on how many Insta-highlights you can add to your profile. (We would advise under 10 so that you aren’t giving your followers too many things to look at- it’s important to keep your followers’ cognitive load nice and low. Don’t give them too much to think about.)
The last thing Highlights give you the ability to do is to create/follow an aesthetic on your page. An example below indicates what is meant by this.
