They say your past haunts you forever. But we say it can also improve your social media marketing – through Instagram Story Highlights! Simply called Highlights, they’re a great medium for you to showcase your past Instagram Stories for as long as you want, on your Instagram page.

You can create one or multiple albums of Highlights to categorise your content. For those of you who haven’t paid attention, these albums with circular thumbnail covers appear below your bio and above your post grid.

And we really can’t stress enough, the importance of the Instagram Highlights feature for your business or creator page.

 

 

The best highlight covers for Instagram are simple and attractive and if you use them the right way they can yield supremely gratifying results for your brand.

Read and follow these 10 best practices for Instagram Highlights:

 

• Segregate your content by topics & categories

 

IG Stories can only appear one after the other, in chronological order. But in IG Highlights, you have the option to create multiple albums, as mentioned earlier. So you can create one for every different category and segregate your Stories by adding them to relevant albums. It just makes it a whole lot easier for your page’s visitors to get to what they’re looking for. You can even arrange the albums in the order you want. Just don’t create too many albums or add all your Stories into your Highlights. Because remember – they’re HIGHLIGHTS.

 

• Have short names & creative covers

 

Each of the albums in your Highlights needs to have a name and a cover. And like all ads, it’s best to have minimal text and catchy visuals for them as well. So although Highlight names can have up to 15 characters, keep yours short, sweet and clear. You can even include emojis if the names are short enough. Highlight covers are circular and can have any visuals. You can crop photographs or even design your own icons from scratch to be used as album covers. The only rule is to keep all thematically consistent with each other as well as your overall branding. You can also reach out to Pop Communications for designing a simple Instagram hygiene package for your brand – this will include a creative profile picture, an interesting bio and covers for your Highlights to start with.

 

 

• Showcase your products & collections

 

Launching a new product or collection? Then you’ll also be posting some of its key advertising creatives as IG Stories. Those products or collections won’t be available to potential customers for viewing after 24 hours. So why waste the creatives? Just add them to the relevant album in your Highlights. Your page’s visitors will also be more likely to open an album named ‘Products’ or names after the products to check them out. Scrolling through posts to find them would be a nightmare.

 

• Promote events, campaigns, sales & offers

 

You can add Stories that market new events, campaigns, sales or offers to a separate album in your Highlights. When the property is terminated, you can just delete its slides from the album. Pretty neat. And increases visibility when the promotion or event is on.

 

• Save your interactions with followers

 

You can create an Highlights album dedicated to your brand page’s interactions with followers & visitors. And you can add all your engaging IG Stories with polls, quizzes, sliders and QnAs to it. Your audience’s engagement with your page is too precious! Don’t let it slide away with a 24-hour Story.

 

• Show off customer testimonials

 

Got customer reviews you want everyone to see? Add them to an album dedicated just for them. Etch those kind words in your Instagram Highlights forever. They’d get lost in your grid if you just make posts on them.

 

• Provide useful content like DIYs & tutorials

 

This idea can truly work wonders with tutorials if you sell products like electronic gadgets, tools and machines… even toys. People who’ve bought your product would be willing to know how to assemble it, make it work or understand all its possible applications. Selling furniture like IKEA? Show them how to assemble it. Selling toys like LEGO? Show them what all you can build with it, and they’ll love you for it.

 

• Answer FAQs

 

You can have an FAQ section on your IG page just like you do on your website. Guess how? It’s a simple trick: just add the ‘Questions’ feature of IG to the first slide of your Stories and answer them in subsequent slides. Finally, add all the Story slides to a separate Highlights album named ‘FAQ’. Clever, huh? You can even simply create a list of the most Frequently Asked Questions about your business along with the answers and post them on the Highlights album yourself.

 

• Feature your brand ambassadors & influencers

 

Your brand ambassadors and social media influencers exist for a solid reason: they help you sell your products with their face and their words. So make use of them in your IG Highlights. Create an album that shows them off and add highlights that showcase all the promotional content they’ve created for you. FYI: you can tag them in your Highlights just like you do in Stories.

 

• Highlight user-generated content

 

Is your brand one of those lucky ones that gets free content from enthusiastic customers who can’t help but share their experience online? The kind of customers who tag you in their Stories as they enjoy your food or try on your clothes? Then it’d be a missed opportunity in Instagram marketing if you fail to trap those precious moments in your Highlights. Because like we said in our blog on marketing predictions for 2023, user-generated content is the most trusted and effective way of brand marketing.

 

At the end of the day, there is no one-size-fits-all Instagram strategy to use Highlights in the best way possible. It all depends on the kind of brand and online marketing strategy you have. And it always helps to have experienced, creative minds execute them for you. That’s where we come in.

 

Pop Communications is a 360° digital marketing agency that works with small business owners as well as large. Let’s talk.

Email: [email protected] | Call: +91 98203 54646

Stay tuned for more Instagram tips for entrepreneurs. Toodles!