Chapter 10
Using Instagram Highlights to Keep Your Content Alive
IN THIS CHAPTER
Familiarizing yourself with Story Highlight galleries
Exploring how to create your own highlights
Discovering how to add more content to your highlights
Stories disappear after 24 hours, and it can be frustrating to know that the content you created is lost. However, there’s a way you can keep those stories alive longer. Highlights allow you to select certain stories to stay active on your profile in specific galleries you set up.
In this chapter, we explain how to set up highlights and how to add content to them. We also talk about some of the reasons why you may want to use highlights and give you some creative ideas for highlight topics.
Getting Acquainted with Highlights
Story Highlights are the series of circles directly beneath a person’s bio on their Instagram profile (see Figure 10-1). A person may only have a few of these galleries, or they may have a number of them that you can scroll through.
FIGURE 10-1: Story Highlights are the series of circles beneath the bio and are a place to collect stories you want to live more than 24 hours.
Each highlight gallery is a collection of stories from that account. Each highlight may contain only one story post or multiple story posts from various times.
A story disappears from the account after 24 hours, but highlights are an opportunity to keep that content on your profile for as long as you want it there.
You can customize all the highlights for your own profile with whatever topics and titles you like!
Creating a New Highlight Gallery
Story Highlights are available to all users, but you have to have active or archived stories on your profile to have access to adding a highlight gallery. If you’ve never shared a story before, go ahead and create one! That opens the option to add highlights to your profile.
If you have access to highlights, the Story Highlights section is beneath the bio information on your profile. If you haven’t yet created any highlights, the circles will be gray and you’ll see a circle with a plus sign (+) to create a new highlight.
Adding a highlight from your profile
To create a new highlight from your profile, tap the plus sign (+) in the circle below your bio. A list of your archived stories appears (see Figure 10-2). Scroll through the list of posts and select one or more you want to add to that highlight.
Tap Next after you’ve selected your posts and move on to the “Naming and customizing your highlight” section.
Adding a highlight from an active story
If you have an active story on your profile and you want to use that one to create a new highlight, you can easily do that by opening the story post from your profile or feed.
At the bottom of your story post is a variety of buttons, including the Highlight button, which is a circle with a heart in the center (see Figure 10-3). Tap that icon, and then proceed to the next section for instructions for naming and customizing your highlight.
FIGURE 10-2: When starting a new Story Highlights gallery, you’ll be able to choose from your archived stories which post(s) to add to the highlight.
FIGURE 10-3: When you access your active stories, you’ll see the Highlight icon (the circle with the heart in the center), which allows you to add that active story to a highlight gallery.
Naming and customizing your highlight
Now that you’ve started a highlight, you need to give it a name. A cursor blinks underneath the cover image so you can type the name. Before you do, here are some things to be aware of:
- Highlight titles can be up to 15 characters in length.
- The titles get cut off after a handful of characters (there’s no set limit).
- Keep the titles as short as possible and keep the most important info at the start of the title.
Type your highlight title and tap Add to create the new Highlight on your profile. What happens next depends on whether you’re adding a highlight from your profile or an active story:
- If you’re adding a highlight from your profile, then your profile page appears so you can see your added highlight.
- If you’re adding a highlight from an active story, the Added to Highlights pop-up screen appears. In this screen, tap View on Profile to see your highlight in your profile. Close the screen by tapping Done.
Adding Content to a Highlight
After you get your highlights set up, you may want to keep adding content to them. Here, we walk you through the steps to add and delete content from a highlight.
Sharing a current story
If you have an active story on your profile that you want to add to an existing highlight, you simply have to access that story from your profile and tap the Highlight icon (refer to Figure 10-3) just as you would when creating a new highlight.
Scroll through the list of highlights and select the one you want to add the story to. Tap that highlight cover image, and your story will be added to the highlight.
Finding an archived story
To add more content to an existing highlight, you can also select from older, archived stories.
The first option is to tap the highlight on your profile. When you’re in the highlight, tap the three-dot Menu button and tap Edit Highlight. You can then select the Add tab (on Android devices) or the Stories tab (on iOS devices) to scroll through archived stories and select as many as you want to add to that highlight (see Figure 10-4).
FIGURE 10-4: Add archived stories to a highlight from the Edit Highlight option on any existing highlight by tapping the Add tab (Android) or the Stories tab (iOS) and selecting the story posts to include.
Alternatively, you can go into your archived stories by tapping the three-line button on your profile screen and selecting Archive from the menu page (see the image on the left in Figure 10-5) to view all your old stories in that feed. Select any story from the list (shown in the image on the right in Figure 10-5) and tap the Highlight icon at the bottom of the story to add it to a highlight.
FIGURE 10-5: Add archived stories to a highlight by accessing the archived stories from your profile and adding each one to a highlight.
Deleting a story from a highlight
If, at some point, you decide you no longer want a particular story to appear in your highlight gallery, you can easily remove it.
Select the highlight from your profile and advance through the story posts in the highlight until you arrive at the one you want to remove. Tap the three-dot Menu button in the lower right. Tap Remove from Highlight from the pop-up screen (see Figure 10-6), and confirm that you want to remove that item from the highlight.
FIGURE 10-6: Deleting any post from a highlight is just as easy as adding a new one!
If you want to delete a bulk number of story posts, you can tap the three-dot Menu button, tap Edit Highlight, and uncheck all the story posts from the list. Tap Done to save the changes, which removes those stories from the highlight.
Coming Up with Fun Ideas for Highlights
You can use highlights for any topic that you create with your stories! It’s best to group your stories into specific topics for your highlights, though.
For example, you may have a lot of stories of your family. But you could create one highlight for family vacations, another one for holiday celebrations, and another one for just your pets.
You can have plenty of different highlights, so feel free to use them as best suited for you. Just realize that only the four most recently used highlights appear on the profile. After that, users have to scroll to see your other highlight galleries.