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How to Make Instagram Highlight Covers

Instagram , Social media

By Matei BobuPublished 2 years ago 7 min read
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Instagram highlight covers are the little circles placed right below the bio section of your profile. Instagram Stories continue to be popular, and highlight covers are an easy win for any business banking on aesthetics.

Engaging Instagram highlight covers help your brand make the best first impression. They give your story a polished look and draw viewers’ attention to your exclusive Instagram Story.

By creating customized Instagram highlight covers, you can categorize your stories and make your brand look organized. The professional-looking highlight covers help you perfectly showcase your brand and entice your Instagram followers to engage with your content.

In this article, we will take you through the ways how you can create your own Instagram Story highlight and the Instagram highlight covers in just a few clicks. We will also help you learn how you can make your Instagram highlight more engaging for your target audience.

Let’s begin with learning what an Instagram Story Highlight is.

What Are Instagram Stories Highlights?

While a regular Instagram Story appears on your profile for just 24 hours, an Instagram Story Highlight stays up indefinitely. These posts can help you gain more followers as they are placed right under your bio and are easily visible to the viewers.

Instagram Stories Highlights let businesses easily showcase the content they want users to see first. In the highlights, you can show off your products, drive traffic to your website, and promote your business.

Why Create Instagram Stories Highlights?

At this point, the placement is so popular that you must create regular Instagram Stories if you are running a business and the account that you are using is a business account. There are various Instagram Story tools available online to help you create engaging Instagram Stories.

These stories help your audience get to know more about your products and connect better with your brand, and with Socialbakers you can schedule Instagram Stories to help keep them coming out regularly.

Creating a highlight for your Instagram Story helps you make your story more attractive. Here are a few major reasons why you must create an Instagram Story Highlight for your business account:

Showcase your content/product

Drive traffic to your website, blog, landing page, etc.

Keep your audience engaged

Grow your audience

You must also incorporate your Instagram Stories into your social media marketing strategy to keep your account active and users engaged. Let’s now check out how you can create an Instagram Highlight.

How to Create an Instagram Story Highlight

Instagram lets you create highlights to keep your Instagram Story content at the top of your Instagram profile. You can either add new stories to a highlight as you create them, or create a highlight out of older stories that you already posted.

To create or add to a highlight, just go into one story and click the “Highlight” button on the bottom. That will pull up a list of your current highlights (if you have any) and also a plus button to create a new highlight.

Once you’ve created a highlight, you can go back through older stories to add to it, or if it’s about new things you’re focused on, simply add the relevant story to the highlight as soon as you post it.

It’s a good idea to have several different highlights that, well, highlight different aspects of your company. Try offering different things, too, such as one for new releases, one for behind-the-scenes things at the company, one for office dogs, etc. Feel free to get creative and showcase the various things that make your company interesting or unique.

Now that you have an Instagram Story Highlight, let’s now look at creating an attractive Instagram highlight cover.

How to Create Instagram Highlight Covers

To create a unique Instagram highlight cover, it helps to find a popular graphic design software available online. There are some apps, like Highlight Cover Maker for Instagram Story and Highlight Cover & Logo Maker for Instagram, that are designed specifically just for this task.

However, there other design softwares that are good because they allow for more creativity and can also help you accomplish several social media design tasks. These include Canva, Adobe Spark, and Appy Pie Design.

These allow you to create stunning images, logos, banners, posters, and other graphics for free. All are good options, but for this example we’ll look at the process for Appy Pie Design.

With the software, you can create your own highlight covers in just a few clicks. It comes with a huge gallery of stock photos that you can use in your graphics to make them more expressive. It also offers customizable templates that you can use to create attractive highlight covers for your Instagram Story.

Let’s now go ahead and learn how to create highlight covers for Instagram using Appy Pie Design:

Login to the Appy Pie Design homepage, if you are an existing user. Or, you can sign up and create an account of your own.

On the next page, click on the ‘Dashboard’ button and select the ‘Blank Canvas’ option in the dropdown.

In the window pop-up on the next screen, you can enter the dimension of the blank canvas to make a highlight cover as per your preferences. The recommended size for the covers would be 1080 x 1920 px. Once done, click on ‘Create’

You will then reach out to the page where you can select the image of your choice and add it to your highlight cover. On the left side of this page, you will see multiple options to customize your cover. These options include text, font, background, color, etc.

If you are using a business account, you can also use these options to resemble the look of your highlight cover with the theme of your brand.

Your Highlight Cover is ready now! Click on the ‘Download’ button at the right top corner to download and share it.

Now that you have created your own highlight cover successfully, make sure before you upload a new Instagram Story that you have the ‘Story Archive’ option enabled in your Instagram account. This helps you keep your old stories saved that you can look at whenever you want.

How to Edit Your Existing Story Highlights to Add the New Highlight Cover

Once you have a highlight cover, you don’t need to add an image to your Instagram Story every time. You can just edit the highlight directly to add a story.

Here are the steps for you to change the highlight cover of the story.

Click on the Highlight you want to change the cover for

Click on the ‘More’ button in the bottom right corner

Next, click on ‘Edit Highlight’

Click on ‘Edit Cover’

Tap the image icon to select the image from your phone’s photo gallery

Select the cover of your choice

Click on ‘Done’ (You might need to tap it three times)

That’s it! Your Instagram highlight cover has been added to your profile.

What Makes an Excellent Instagram Story Highlight Cover?

Here are a few tips to help you learn how you can make your Instagram Story highlights more attractive:

Choose the Stories That Matter the Most: Know your audience and ask yourself what is important for them. What would they want to see here? Something trending? The season’s collection? Or something useful for the longer term.

Show Off Your Brand’s Visuals: Make sure you show your brand’s aesthetic in your Instagram Story highlight. Add your brand’s font, color, capitalization, and even the emojis that it most commonly uses. The Instagram Story highlight cover is the best place to show off your brand’s visuals. This helps your audience recall your brand.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment: Your Instagram Story highlight needs to be unique as it helps you highlight the message you want to convey to your target audience. Make sure you try creating it out in different ways. You can add expressive images, engaging videos, GIFs, and much more to your stories.

Convert Your Audience to Customers: You can make your story highlights more interesting by trying new things. If you are promoting an ecommerce business and have over 10,000 followers, you can try adding a shopping bag icon to your story.

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