Ways to Use Instagram Highlights in Your Social Media Marketing Efforts
A little more than a year back, Instagram introduced two new features which really made it easy for business owners to use Instagram for effective marketing. The first was called Stories Archive. Earlier, the stories created on Instagram used to be taken off after 24 hours. This new feature automatically took off those stories and put them in an archive. The ‘automatically’ part of the previous sentence is optional, though, and you can pick and choose which of your stories you want to archive and which you can let go.
The other feature introduced by Instagram was called Highlights in which you can showcase a few of your archived stories. You simply need to start by going into ‘new’ option of the Highlights section, select which particular archived story you want to show off, and select a cover for the highlight. After this, whoever visits your Instagram profile will see it as a red colored circle, tapping on which will show the particular story to the viewer. Let us go into this in a little more detail and look at four easy ways to use Instagram Highlights in your social media marketing efforts.
- If you are using Instagram to showcase the launch of a new variant of your product line, then you would be keen to show this story to every viewer who comes to your profile. The feature allows you to take down a particular Highlight when it is no longer needed, and replace it with another Highlight. You can also use this feature to push up the views for particular brands which are not doing that well.
- If you run your Instagram profile to promote your business, then you will see that there are some queries which are repeated very frequently. Initially you might have the bandwidth to explain to each person in great detail, even if you have answered the same query last week. But as your business grows, you will find such repetitive queries very disturbing. You can list down these frequently asked queries and their answers and put them up as a Highlight so that any visitor can always see them at the top.
- There are some posts you might have which you are always happy to highlight. It could be a particular post which attracted a lot of engagement and lots of conversations, or it could be a very gushing review by someone of stature. You can put them up as a sort of wall hanging in the form of a Highlight.
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Many business owners use Instagram to give some candid stories as well, instead of only brand descriptions. But with the huge volume of traffic on Instagram, these cute stories could easily get pushed below very quickly. You can create a story of such posts, and then put them into a Highlight.
In the last one year or so, a number of Instagram users have derived lots of benefits from Instagram Highlights. If you follow the four easy methods listed above, you too can see your business gains increasing.
