Your highlight tray is one of the first places new followers check out when they find your profile. You don’t want them to find a random assortment of poorly labelled snippets from nights out in Soho in 2017, or even worse highlight covers with no content behind them at all.

Highlights are a way to categorise your Instagram Stories and keep them on your profile after 24 hours, ask yourself what kind of categories of content your new followers would expect to see. Reviews of your product? Press clippings from publications that have featured you? Tutorials?

I suggest taking a Marie Kondo approach to your highlights. 

You don’t have to save every single thing you’ve ever posted to your story. Only save stories to your highlights that spark joy and add value to your followers. 

 

Should you have matching highlight covers?

Sure, why not, they make your profile look slick and professional, but please don’t have highlight covers and no content behind them or matching covers and no valuable content on your feed.

I personally prefer to not have highlight covers, because I think having a glimpse at what the highlight contains is more engaging than a designed cover that looks the same as all the others.

PSA: you don’t need to upload all your highlight covers at once.

You can now select an image from your camera roll to add as the highlight cover, just go to edit highlight, edit cover, and tap the image symbol.

 

What should you name your highlights?

You’ve got to make the titles make sense to strangers, so no emoji, niche references or acronyms. 

Instagram gives you 15 characters but you can only see nine capital letters or around 12 lower case letters, so make your title nine characters or less.

So one word highlight titles are ideal, or you could create covers that have titles on them and then you don’t need highlight titles at all.

 

TLDR: you don’t to save everything to your highlight, make it a curated selection of your best bits.

 

I hope this helped you! If you want to learn more about Instagram marketing and how to grow your personal brand on the platform, download my 14 day step-by-step personal branding course.