How to Optimize Instagram Story Highlights to Hook Your Profile Visitors

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You’ve heard a lot about how Instagram Story highlights can hook your profile visitors.

Maybe you’ve even created a few highlights for your brand.

But you currently don’t get enough people to check out those highlights.

And if people don’t see them, setting them up becomes pointless, right?

That’s why you need to optimize Instagram Story highlights to deliver your intended results.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to create Instagram Story highlights that your profile visitors want to see.

Why you should optimize your Instagram Story highlights

Creating Instagram Story highlights is never just to add another design element to your Instagram profile.

It’s to boost your Instagram marketing results.

Here are some benefits of optimizing your Instagram Story highlights:

Engage Instagram profile visitors

Once people scroll down your Instagram profile page to Story highlights, they expect to see information that may be absent in your recent Instagram posts. 

Instagram Story highlights let you engage profile visitors before they get to your posts. It’s also an effective way to optimize your Instagram profile.

Educate people about your business

Optimizing your Instagram Story highlights lets you deliver the most important information about your business and products.

When you lure people to view your highlights, you can tell them about your history, products, customers, and other things they need to know.

See it as an Instagram catalog for your business.

Exploit social proof

If you collect social proof elements like user-generated content (UGC), testimonials, and influencer posts, you can display them on your Story highlights.

Doing this will compel more people to research and try your products.

Drive website traffic

Since you can use the link sticker in your story, this provides an opportunity to link to your website pages.

So, you can gather stories that link to your most important website pages and display them in highlights. For example, an ecommerce business can link to a product category page.

Now, let’s go into how to optimize your Instagram Story highlights to achieve these benefits.

How to optimize Instagram Story highlights

1. Use relevant Instagram story highlights ideas 

Instagram story highlights ideas are the categories of your highlights. These tell a viewer what to expect if they click on a highlight.

So, using the right idea can pique your audience’s curiosity and compel them to view the highlight.

To get the best ideas, you need to ask: What does my ideal audience need to know about my business?

Once you answer this question, it becomes easy to come up with highlight ideas that fit your business and audience.

This also means the best ideas for you depend on your business. For example, if you’re a coach, you may use highlights ideas like:

• About me
• Services
• Testimonials
• Courses
• Books
• Podcast

Meanwhile, if you run an ecommerce business, those ideas may be:

• About us
• Products
• User-generated content (UGC)
• Blog
• Promotions
• FAQs

Before you start creating Story highlights, sit down and map out the categories that will work for your business and audience.

If you need more ideas, check out my list of Instagram Story highlights ideas.

See the highlight ideas Amy Porterfield uses in her Instagram highlights:

You can see ideas like podcast, team, book, bootcamp, sneak peek, and more.

Here’s another example from the yoga clothing company Alo Yoga:

The company exploits ideas like events, fabrics, stores, sizing, and more.

From these 2 examples, you can see these accounts have used highlights ideas that fit their businesses and what their audiences need to know. 

2. Design beautiful Instagram story highlights covers

Instagram story highlights covers are the thumbnails for story highlights on your profile. 

This image can act as a magnet to pull people to view your highlights.

Put simply, 2 major things will determine whether people click to view a highlight:

• The highlight category name
• The highlight cover

These factors are why you need to design beautiful covers for your highlights. 

How?

You can begin with Canva templates. Just type “Instagram Story highlights cover” into the search bar and select a template you like in the results.

Once you find a beautiful template, you can click on it to preview and customize it.

In the design editor, you can edit texts, change fonts, and adjust font size. Canva also lets you add effects and animations to your texts.

You can even import icons to fit into each cover. The search box in the editor lets you search for different types of icons for various uses.

For instance, instead of the letter Q here, I’ve imported a quote icon:

Once you’re done with your covers, click on the “Share” button at the top right corner of the page to download the covers.

After designing the covers, the next step is to upload them to your Instagram account. 

Visit your profile and click on a highlight. Then, click the 3 dots at the bottom right and select “Edit Highlight” from the options.

Then, click “Edit cover” and select the highlight cover from your gallery. After selecting the image, click “Done” and the new cover will reflect on your Instagram profile.

Remember to use a consistent theme for your covers to avoid confusion. 

If you visit the Instagram account of PrettyLittleThing, a women’s clothing company, one color will scream at you: pink.

And this is obvious in its Instagram Story highlights covers.

This consistent branding color takes profile visitors through a smooth visual experience.

With beautiful Instagram Story highlights covers, you give your profile visitors more reasons to click the highlights.

3. Find the right stories for your highlights

After defining highlight ideas and creating covers, you need to put the right stories behind them.

Put simply, the story is the content your viewer expects. The stories, when done well, push engagement to another level.

How do you find these stories?

The best option is to create them. Since you already know the categories you need stories for, you can create your stories along those lines.

For example, if you have a Story highlight for Behind-the-scenes, you can share a few stories that fit into this particular highlight.

Even if you want to add user-generated content (UGC) to your highlights, you only have to click on the post and share to your Story. Before sharing, Instagram will give you an option to add the post to your highlights.

Thanks to this option, you have a lot of control over having the best stories for your highlights. 

Another question that may come up here is: How many stories should be in a single highlight?

Personally, I think 5 to 10 is good for any highlight. While you may have 30 stories that fit a highlight, you don’t want to bore your viewers.

Remember, some of these viewers are coming to your profile for the first time. 

So, find the best stories and feed them to your audience.

4. Update your highlights with fresh information

Nobody wants to see a story highlight of over 200 weeks. That’s about 4 years ago.

That’s because a viewer may think you’ve neglected this section of your profile for a long time.

Of course, in some cases, the number of weeks doesn’t matter. For example, an about me or throwback highlight can be evergreen for years.

However, you should regularly update highlights like products or testimonials to show your business is still active.

To be honest, updating your highlights can fall to the back of your mind in the midst of other Instagram tasks.

One way to update your highlights is to create a schedule for doing it. This can be monthly or any interval that works for you.

If you go through PrettyLittleThing’s Instagram highlights, you’ll see that most of the stories in them are less than a year old.

Unfortunately, updating your highlights can mess up their order. Instagram brings the most recently updated highlight to the front of the queue.

Here’s the problem: 

You want your most important highlights to show up first. 

Because when you think of it, profile visitors will only see about 5 highlights on their screens. They have to swipe left to see the other highlights.

Currently, Instagram doesn’t have a feature that allows you to reorder your highlights.

But there’s a workaround.

Add a story to a highlight to bring the highlight to the front of the queue. Then, delete the story, and the highlight will still keep its spot.

You can use this workaround to reorganize your Story highlights.

Update your highlights with recent stories to make viewers feel your business is active.

How to create Instagram Story Highlights

To create Instagram Story highlights, you can follow 2 routes:

• Your story archives
• Your current stories

Visit your Instagram profile to begin. If you’re creating a highlight for the first time, click “+” at the top right corner of your profile and select “Story highlight.”

If you already have highlights on your profile, scroll below your bio and click “+” to add a new highlight. 

On the next page, you’ll see the stories from your archives to add to the highlight. After selecting the stories, click “Next” at the top right corner.

Then, you can write your highlight name and upload a cover image. Then click “Done.”

To create a highlight from an Instagram Story, click on your story and then “Highlight” at the bottom. 

You’ll see a popup of your current highlights and the “+” icon to create a new highlight. From here, you can set up a new highlight.

Another option is to add a story to an existing highlight. Click on the highlight and then the 3 dots at the bottom right corner.

In the popup, click “Edit highlight” and you can add a new story on the next page.

Conclusion

Many businesses and individuals underuse Instagram Story highlights. And they fail to expose more aspects of their businesses to their audiences.

You want to squeeze every benefit from your Instagram Story highlights.

Because Instagram Story highlights introduce various aspects of your business to a profile visitor.

It’s a way to invite them to know more about your business.

So, creating your Instagram Story highlights is only the bare minimum. You also have to optimize Instagram Story highlights to attract, engage, and deliver relevant information to your profile visitors.

Luckily, you can implement some of the steps on this page today.

Optimize your Instagram Story highlights today and move your business into your audience’s mind.