Instagram highlights are one of the platform’s most valuable features. You may have noticed the colour coded or graphic embellished circles underneath the bio of some of the accounts you follow, and even though they’ve become more popular over time, they are still a highly underutilized tool.

Today, we’re covering everything you need to know to get started with creating your own highlights for your Insta page.

What is a highlight?

If this is the first time you’re hearing about highlights, we’re referring to story compilations that get stored on your main Instagram feed. This is what they look like:

Rosso Coffee puts information about their cafe and events in their highlights

A story only lasts 24 hours on your feed, but if you put it onto a highlight it can be on your feed indefinitely. This can be great if you put valuable information onto a story, had a lot of posts about a specific subject, or generally anything you want to immortalize on your page.

This can also be useful for new people visiting your page for the first time since they can get a feel for what kind of information you share very quickly by seeing the categories for your highlights.

How to get started

If you’ve ever created any story on your Instagram, then you can start creating highlights! If you haven’t, you should! Get some tips on using stories for your business here.

It’s quick and easy to get started! Right on your profile, below your bio, there should be a ‘plus’ button with the word add below it. Just click this and it will pull up all your archived stories.

Right below your bio, you’ll find a spot for highlights.

You can start by looking through them and picking out a few categories you talk about often, like ‘food’ or ‘cleaning tips’ and so on. Once you’ve come up with your first potential category, just go through and select any story that you want to put in that highlight.

Studio 85 has great examples of categories for highlights.

If you just recently put up a story and it’s still showing up, you’ll see a ‘Highlights’ button right at the bottom. If you want to add something from previous stories, you can go into your archived content (on your profile, at the top right corner in the dropdown menu) and see your old stories and pick some posts to add to highlights.

Tip: a highlight can have up to 100 posts, so if you have something that you have a ton of information on, you may want to create multiple parts for it. Otherwise, try to keep your most valuable content and remove less useful posts.

How to make highlights look great

You can add covers to each highlight so that all your highlights look coordinated on your feed.

One choice is to use a picture from within your highlight. Just go into the highlight reel, click the three dots and ‘edit highlight’. At the top, you’ll have the option to edit cover and you’ll be able to scroll through all the photos in it and pick one.

Hey Pj uses pictures from the locations of the highlights she posts.

You can also add your own graphic (which we recommend creating on Canva for free). When you’re editing cover, on the left of all your own posts, there is a button to add something from your gallery. Just find the graphic in your phone and crop it to look good in the highlight cover circle.

Bridgeland uses graphics that were created on a software like Canva as covers for their highlights.

If you want to learn more about creating great stories for your business, head here.

If you’re interested in having someone else take over these tasks, we also offer Social Media Management Services which you can learn about here!