Since standard Instagram stories disappear after 24 hours, the Instagram highlights feature allows users to pick their favourite stories and save them, so that they can appear permanently on their profile for everyone to watch Instagram highlights at anytime.
Instagram stories highlights appear right below your bio and above your posts, which is prime real estate for exposure.
Plus, they’re quick and easy to create.
Simply go to your Instagram profile and click on the plus sign below your bio and above your posts. You can also click on the plus sign on the top right hand corner, next to the menu tab.
When you do, you will be able to select which of your stories you want to turn into Instagram stories highlights.
If you’d like to take your Instagram marketing to the next level, and increase the results you’re getting from your current Instagram marketing efforts considerably, download my FREE Instagram report, titled The Top 15 Instagram Marketing Strategies That Drive Traffic And Sales. Simply enter your name and email and I’ll instantly send you the report.
If you haven’t created any Instagram stories, you’ll need to create one first. To create an Instagram story, simply click on the plus sign on the top right hand corner, next to the menu tab, and select “story”.
Note that there is no limit to how many Instagram stories highlights you can create and note that every time you turn a story to a highlight, that story will move to first position.
After more than 5 Instagram highlights, your audience will have to scroll to see the other ones.
There are 5 elements to take into consideration to increase your Instagram highlights views.
The first element, is being selective about what topic you’ll create Instagram highlights for.
Instagram highlights are the equivalent of website menu tabs. You want people to discover the most important categories of your business and not have too many options to choose from if you want to increase your Instagram highlights views.
If you have an ecommerce store selling women’s clothing, your website categories could be the new clothing season, sales, accessories, skirts, dresses, tops and trousers. If so, your Instagram highlights could have the exact same categories.
You don’t want to have too many Instagram stories highlights, because the more people have to look through all of them, the less likely they will click on any as it requires time and effort to check them all.
The second element to pay attention to, to get more Instagram highlights views is the title.
When naming your story highlight, it can only be 15 characters long, including spaces, and only the first 10 characters will appear, the rest of the title will be replaced by 3 dots.
So you want to avoid long titles and you want to avoid words that are not descriptive. When people don’t understand what highlights are about, they simply don’t watch Instagram highlights.
So for example, avoid generic titles such as “happiness” or “love”. Instead, have descriptive titles such as “special offers” or “reviews” or “new products”.
Titles can also include emojis which also help in attracting people’s attention and making your highlights stand out further.
The third element to pay attention to, to get more Instagram highlights views is having evergreen content or content that is relevant and up-to-date.
Ideally, you want your Instagram highlights to be evergreen as much as possible, to avoid having to always edit them to keep them up-to-date.
Evergreen content for highlights could be customer reviews, client testimonials, educational content how-to videos, tutorials and product displays.
If you display in your Instagram stories highlights content that is not evergreen such as special offers that expire, or events that have passed or products that are out of stock or no longer available, make sure you stay-on-top of your highlights and keep them up-to-date by editing them or deleting them.
If highlights are no longer relevant, less Instagram users will watch Instagram highlights and it will affect the performance of all your highlights.
You can delete or edit your Instagram stories highlights by tapping and holding your story highlight. When you do, two options will appear: either to delete your story or edit your story.
If you’d like to take your Instagram marketing to the next level, and increase the results you’re getting from your current Instagram marketing efforts considerably, download my FREE Instagram report, titled The Top 15 Instagram Marketing Strategies That Drive Traffic And Sales. Simply enter your name and email and I’ll instantly send you the report.
The fourth element to pay attention to is the highlights cover for Instagram.
They have to be the right size to make sure the highlights cover for Instagram fits and doesn’t get cut off. Thumbnails should be 1080 pixels wide by 1920 pixels high.
You can use image creation tools such as canva.com to create an attention-grabbing highlights cover for Instagram.
You want your images to be aligned with your brand colours for consistency, but you don’t have to use the same pictures for all highlights, so they stand out from each other.
You can also add text overlay on your highlights cover for Instagram to draw even more attention to each of them.
For example, if your highlights cover for Instagram is about special offers, your text overlay could be “limited time” or “limited stock” or “ends soon” to entice people to click on the highlight.
Text overlay on highlights can be used to create a sense of urgency to receive more clicks and views, but make sure what you state is true.
The fifth element to pay attention to, to increase your Instagram highlights views is their order.
You want the most important highlights to be at the front. So if you’ve noticed that some Instagram highlights are more popular than others, make sure you re-order them to the front. There is no straightforward way to re-order your highlights.
You can’t simply drag them in the order you want. Instead, you need to add a new Instagram story to a highlight, because when you do, the highlight will automatically appear at the front.
Simply tab and hold your finger on the highlight you want to add to the beginning of your highlight list, click on “edit highlight”, select “stories”, then select a random story and press “done”.
It doesn’t matter which story you add to the highlight because once the highlight is at the front, you can delete the story.
To do so, you simply open your highlight and delete the added story.
If for example you have 6 Instagram highlights, about your different categories, you’ll want the first highlights to be the most time-sensitive such as special offers and discounts or special events or news-related items such as new products.
The least important or least popular highlights should appear after, such as tutorials, reviews, etc…
So there you have it, the 5 ways to get more people to watch Instagram highlights.
If you’d like to take your Instagram marketing to the next level, and increase the results you’re getting from your current Instagram marketing efforts considerably, download my FREE Instagram report, titled The Top 15 Instagram Marketing Strategies That Drive Traffic And Sales. Simply enter your name and email and I’ll instantly send you the report.
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About the Author
Corinna Essa is known internationally as the go-to person when it comes to social media marketing.
Corinna owns a social media marketing company helping businesses around the world leverage the power of social media without doing any of the legwork. Her company has been featured in many media outlets including Sky Business news, Working Women magazine, Ymagazine, Tasmanian Times, Channel 7 and 101fm.
Corinna is also the author of 2 bestselling books “Money On Demand – The 16 Fastest Ways to Becoming a Millionaire Online” and “Reach: The SECRETS to converting your social media audience into your network marketing downline fast”
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