Story Highlights

Originally, Stories were intended to be temporary visual or video content, but Story Highlights allow users to choose specific Stories that they want to showcase in a permanent way. As a prominent section below their bio on their profile page, the Stories featured in Story Highlights become much more easily accessible, offering the best glimpse of the user’s content.

This function is commonly utilized by people, influencers, brands, creators, and businesses to neatly classify their Stories into organized, thematic categories—like travel, food, or lifestyle—that audiences can easily find and look at any time they please.

Functioning as both an archival mechanism and a branding tool, Story Highlights allows users to create a customized display of their interests, personality, or brand identity on Instagram.

Text, images, videos, GIFs, stickers, and interactive elements can be included in highlights that can be edited, added to, or removed by the user at any time.

Each Highlight is assembled and shown in a circular album-like icon, called a Highlight cover, that can be personalized with a thumbnail image or design to represent its substance or motif.

Users can extend their profiles with these Highlights. They're not exactly an extension of the profile because the user can only add content to a Highlight and not subtract (as is often the case, if not always, with profile extensions) unless the user chooses to delete the Highlight entirely. Information can be rendered memorable with a Highlight. And so can the moments leading up to a user's next big promotion. If what a user has to say won't (for reasons of time or context) quite fit on a billboard, then the user has an even better way to say it with a Highlight.

In terms of personal branding or social media marketing, Story Highlights are stellar. They allow people and organizations to really push engagement, deliver a more straightforward message, create a tighter aesthetic, and give users of the app a shortcut to what might otherwise be lost in the ephemerality of Instagram Stories.

To sum up, Story Highlights serve as a crucial and flexible instrument for users to maintain ephemeral content, render it elegantly organized, and, in the final analysis, bestow upon their social media accounts an upgraded sense of narrative continuity.