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Instagram stories only last 24 hours.
But Instagram story highlights allow you to keep a story for as long as you want.
This opens up a lot of possibilities for your business.
Do you have awesome stories that are too good for 1 day?
Or better still, you want to create stories about various aspects of your business and curate them with story highlights?
These ideas offer a great way to optimize Instagram stories highlights to engage more profile visitors.
But there’s more.
Having well-organized Instagram story highlights is one of the best ways to optimize your Instagram profile.
Without further ado, let’s see 15 creative and effective Instagram stories highlight ideas for your inspiration.
1. Reviews/Testimonials
What do your current customers think about your product?
If they’re saying positive things, they can convince other users to purchase your products.
For any business, social proof is one of the most effective ways of marketing your business.
Put simply, prospects believe your customers.
So, after collecting online reviews, show them to potential customers.
If customers speak about amazing results they got from your products, feature them in your story highlights.
Here’s an example from Itele footwear:
Here, the business featured feedback from customers after receiving their ordered footwear.
2. Product display
For most businesses, the ultimate aim on Instagram is to sell products.
What better way to sell than display products your audience will love to buy?
Maybe even throw in some enticing offers?
Whether you have amazing images or videos of your product in use, story highlights help prospects go through your catalog to find a fitting product.
Mercedes Benz does this well on its profile.
On their story highlight, they’ve created different vehicle categories such as AMG, Maybach, and G-class.
3. Customers
Without customers, no business can exist.
That’s why you should take every opportunity to celebrate your customers.
Whenever customers feature your product in their posts or stories, you can repost on your Instagram story highlights. Thereby, prospects can see the results customers are obtaining from your product.
Check out this example from Moe Assist, an influencer tool:
When you open the stories, you’ll find cases where the tool has helped its customers improve their business.
4. User-generated content (UGC)
When customers love a product, they need no big incentive to promote it.
So, when there’s an opportunity to feature on your page, these customers will grab it with both hands.
To collect user-generated content efficiently, you can specify a hashtag that customers should use when posting your product.
This way, it’s easy to find the best posts and feature them on Instagram stories.
For instance, Wayfair tells its customers to use the hashtag #WayfairAtHome in posts that feature their products.
The company, in turn, has a story highlight showing Wayfair products in customers’ homes.
You can check out these Instagram user-generated content (UGC) examples for more inspiration.
5. Employees
One of the major backbones of any business is its employees. After all, they’re responsible for creating and marketing your products.
When you show off your employees, you give life to your products.
You also excite your audience.
By seeing the people behind your products, your audience can connect better with your brand.
If you’re looking for a great example of this on Instagram, look no further than Ring Concierge.
When you go through this highlight, you’ll see employees and their positions. Furthermore, you’ll see their favorite rings.
6. Content marketing
Very few people see Instagram as a platform to promote written content.
And that’s because you can only have a link in your bio.
Luckily, Instagram also allows you to have links in your stories.
Therefore, you can promote your blog posts, resources, landing pages, and other forms of written content through your stories.
While featuring these pieces of content in your story, you can add them to your highlights.
Later, an Instagram scheduling tool, has implemented this idea effectively.
As one of the top marketing Instagram accounts, they provide a lot of social media marketing advice on the platform.
You can see their latest posts, most read posts, free courses, resources, and more content categories in their highlights.
7. Behind the scenes
What’s the process that brought your product to reality?
Customers who enjoy your products are eager to know.
In light of this, showing behind-the-scenes images and videos can increase engagement with your audience and improve brand affinity.
Naturally, a fitting example is from Learn Filmmaking.
In this highlight, you’ll see how some movie scenes were shot. Here, there are cameras, other filmmaking gear, and the filmmaking crew.
8. Fun and games
While business naturally brings a lot of pressure, your customers still want to have fun.
Instagram itself is a place for fun.
Many of your customers visit Instagram to escape from pressure at work and other aspects of their lives.
So, you can provide a happy escape and engage them more.
Warby Parker is a great example of this.
Warby Parker posts different types of games. To answer the trivia, you can reply to the story highlight.
But there are also puzzles to fill and post on your story. Another benefit Warby Parker will obtain is better brand awareness.
9. Question & answer (Q & A) or Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
At different stages of the buying cycle, prospects and customers will have different questions.
This can be about your products or brand.
Over the years, you probably have an idea of the most common questions your audience has.
Just like Lego, you can create a Question & Answer (Q & A) story highlight to answer the questions.
Through a Lego historian, Lego answered popular questions about the Lego bricks.
Another face of the Q & A coin is frequently asked questions (FAQs).
And to get all the relevant questions, reach out to your customer service reps about the most common customer complaints.
Once you have this list, you can create stories to answer these questions. Then, collate the stories into a Story highlight.
With its FAQs story highlights, PrettyLittleThing answers questions about returns, customer care, and recycling.
Having this highlight can help you provide customer care before customers reach out to you.
10. Wallpaper
If your products are eye-catching or classic, your customers (more like fans) may want to feature your product as wallpaper on their smartphones.
This is common for products such as cars, nature, airplanes, movies, and more.
Netflix has featured wallpapers from some popular shows in their story highlights.
From these highlights, fans can take a screenshot and feature the picture as their wallpaper. This helps to create more brand awareness.
11. History
Every business has days of its humble beginning.
Whether you have thousands or millions of customers, they want to know how it all started and the milestones you’ve achieved over the years.
This will help them connect with your struggles to build the brand they now love. GoPro has done this excellently on their Instagram highlights.
In the “History” highlights, you’ll find out about their early days in 2002 when Nick Woodman conceptualized the first GoPro camera.
There are also milestones such as their first 4K camera, 15 million followers on Instagram, and 2 billion views on YouTube.
12. DIY
For some product categories, customers want to recreate it at home.
This is where DIY tips can come in handy.
In some cases, this can even challenge your audience to see their results. To illustrate, Freddy’s Steakburgers post recipes on their story highlights.
Their audience can follow these recipes and create delicacies at home.
13. Polls
Polls are an exciting way to engage your audience.
So, you can bring out the list of all the questions you’ve been itching to ask about your brand and products.
This way, customers and prospects will reveal their preferences about your product and operation.
See this example from Adobe:
In this poll, Adobe asks questions such as what inspires their audience, their creative fuel, where they feel most creative, and more.
14. Environmental policy/sustainability
With the increase in global warming and the potential hazards for the world we live in, people want to make a positive change.
We need to save the world.
One way people make a positive change is to buy from businesses that manufacture through a sustainable process.
When people buy from these businesses, they believe they’re making the world a better place.
So, if you follow environmental sustainability practices, you can display that in your story highlights.
A popular example of this is Starbucks.
In these stories, Starbucks explains how it’s cutting down plastic use in coffee containers and investing in renewable energy.
15. Workplace inclusiveness
Too many people in this world encounter discrimination and hatred in their daily endeavors.
It’s sad but true.
As individuals and businesses, we have the responsibility to stand against injustice.
In some cases, customers want to see businesses stand against discrimination around the world. For instance, Aerie takes a stand with its support for the “Open to All” initiative.
When you go through these stories, you’ll see Aerie’s role and how you can contribute.
How do you create Instagram story highlights?
Navigate to the top right corner of your profile and click the “+” icon.
Doing this will bring up options of what you can create.
Click “Story Highlight” to continue.
On the next page, select the stories you want to add to your highlight.
Then, click “Next.”
After that, select a cover for your highlight and enter your preferred name.
Lastly, click “Add” at the top right corner of the page to complete the setup.
After your highlight goes live, you can edit to remove or add more stories.
To do this, tap the story highlight and select the 3 dots at the bottom right corner.
This is vital for aspects of your business that change with time.
Instagram story highlights let you tell your business’s story to Instagram users.
Ensure you tell a captivating story.
Conclusion
So, what’s the next step?
Visit your Instagram profile and set up stories highlights using these ideas.
Instagram story highlights can help you connect better with your audience, display products, and convert profile visitors to customers.
Which story highlights do you currently have on your profile?
Share in the comments!
Samuel writes long-form guides to help businesses and entrepreneurs achieve better results from their marketing activities. He also writes for marketing and SaaS companies that want more leads and customers. Get in touch with him to discuss your content needs.