Unforgettable Instagram Highlights
Nine tweaks to dramatically improve your Instagram profile in 5 minutes!
Instagram highlights are a great way to keep all of the content that you create for your business in related categories. Setting up story highlight categories means your followers can find what they’re looking for quickly and they can navigate to the stuff they find most interesting.
In our featured video, I’m going to give you five specific things you can do to increase your user experience by making little tweaks to your Instagram highlights design.
Also, we’re going to go over four things you can do to get more eyeballs on your new super optimized clean and follow-worthy profile. That’s nine actionable steps you can take to get
How to Tweak Your Instagram Highlights for Better Engagement
It takes half a second for someone to decide if they want to follow you or not. It’s up to you to do everything you can to help that person make the right choice.
If you like the concept of using Instagram highlights to market your main content start creating your highlight covers! I’ll show you how in my highlight cover design video.
You will get a step-by-step on how to create your own Instagram highlight covers and icons.
Plus, learn how to create new highlights and how to edit and customize your covers in this blog post.
Five Tips for Tweaking Your Instagram Profile for Better Marketing
Okay, it’s time to get down to business, or Instagram for
Let’s get started.
Highlights titles are essential, this is how to make sure yours are perfect
Keep your title to 10 characters or less including spaces to avoid having it get cut off.
There’s nothing worse than coming up with a brilliantly clever cover name only to have it not make sense because half of it isn’t even visible.
Text on Your Icons and Why Size Matters
Use no text or large text on the icon. When creating your highlight cover icons make sure that the font size is large enough to be seen on a small screen otherwise keep it simple with a simple symbol that represents that category well.
Put your most important categories first, Why I stole this from Web designers
Only five highlights show up on your profile, any more than that and the user will have to swipe left to see the remaining highlights so make sure that your most essential highlights are first.
Be intentional about the cover Icons you choose, just like your website hero image.
Brand your icons or use a theme, How You Control Everything
You can choose which highlighted stories becomes your cover. You can also adjust, zoom and reposition them.
If you have this much control over how your Instagram profile looks why not add covers that match your brand? Use the icon or design that best suits your business aesthetic and personality. You have the power to make your account look extra polished. You want your followers to know you take pride in your stories, and this is an excellent way to do that.
How Emojis can add a double punch for your visuals
The more visual cues you give your followers, the more you lessen the possibility of confusion on the subject of your highlights.
However, If you don’t want to use custom highlight covers with icons, You can add emojis to your highlight titles.
The emoji will help give your followers another visual cue on what the highlight topic is.
An image is worth a thousand words, but an emoji has a way of telling the rest of the story.
Use everything you have at your disposal to make it as easy as possible for your followers, and potential followers.
Visibility & Interaction
Those first five tips were great for making your profile look good and for giving your followers a good user experience, but interaction and visibility are also significant.
The good news is that there are a few easy tips that will help you get on the right path to interacting better with your followers and gaining visibility to attract new followers. Let’s take a look at four of them.
Location, location, location and hashtags too
Use location and hashtag stickers to increase visibility for those who are searching for stories in their general area or a particular topic. We tend to feel a comradery with those we have the most in common.
Even things as simple as living in the same town can make you more likable.
Location tags are especially helpful if you have a brick and mortar business. Even if your service is global that location tag can help people see you as a real person instead of just another company on the internet.
Curate Carefully, Why unlimited Instagram Highlights still have a limit
You can create unlimited highlights, but you can only have up to 100 stories inside of each highlight section. Keep this in mind when curating what goes into your top five categories
When Pay to Play is a Good Idea
Try Instagram story ads and promoted stories if you have a good handle on your ICA (ideal customer avatar) this could be a significant investment.
How Not to Annoy Your Instagram Followers with this one simple tip
If you’re using custom covers and adding them all at once, make sure you give your followers something they will want from you. Use the extra space for relatable quotes, captions, stickers or something. Otherwise, you can upload covers directly from your phone and bypass annoying your followers all together.
Change your Instagram highlight covers without uploading the image
Here’s how:
Press and hold the story highlight you want to customize
When the menu options come up select “edit highlight.”
With the edit highlight page open select the option directly under the icon “edit cover.”
In the edit cover screen at the bottom Scroll to the left until you see the image icon, tap on the icon
Choose an image from your phone’s camera roll
Better Instagram Content, the three things that can get you there
Instagram is an excellent platform for business. With the addition of product tags and the ability to file away story highlights into categories. Add to that IGTV, and you have a marketing trifecta. Instagram is the perfect platform to support your primary business online.
Focus and Intention
You create tons of content for your business from blog posts to product tutorials as well as promotional materials. Make sure that you represent all of those things well in your Instagram stories highlights. Additionally, make sure that people interested in specific information can find it easily.
No one is going to binge watch all of your story highlights to get to that one thing. I’m pretty sure you know that though. However, if you make it intentional and pique their interest, it might lead them into more of your content.
Why You Shouldn’t Focus on Instagram
If you want to make Instagram, your primary platform learning the fantastic features you have at your fingertips is worth the investment in time.
If you already have a focus on another platform, your best bet is to keep your attention there. That is at least until you’ve conquered that platform or at have a good strategy in place before looking to the shiny new thing.
With that said, you may still want to think about Instagram later on as well, especially for creatives and businesses with a visual brand.
I have a small presence on Instagram, but I have not put much focus on it in the past, that is going to change soon, so I’ll use this time to self promote in a shameless kind of way. Follow me on Instagram!
Marketing with Instagram Highlights in One Neat Little Package
If you’re interested in all things Instagram, make sure to check out some of our other posts. Start with planning Instagram content. When you’ve got that checked of your to-do list, why not create Instagram templates for your entire brand account including Instagram story icons, profile picture, in feed templates, and more.
Want more? Learn how to up your game on your profile feed as well with Instagram puzzle grid templates in Photoshop. Oh but I’m still not done. Learn how to create custom Instagram highlight covers, design aids and how to make your icons too.
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