What Are Instagram Highlights and How Do They Work?

Instagram highlights are collections of stories that appear at the top of your profile. While Instagram stories usually only live for 24 hours before they disappear, adding them to a highlight keeps them active and available indefinitely. Users can continue to interact with highlighted stories too, including liking, responding, or sharing them in a direct message.

You can find Instagram highlights on your profile page situated in between your bio and your post grid. Highlights stay pinned to your profile until you remove or delete them, so they’re a great way to crunch a ton of content into a small space. You can add up to 100 stories in a single highlight, and you can create a highlight about anything. These are a few of the most popular ways that brands use highlights:

• Meet the team
• Behind the scenes
• Brand values
• Specific products
• Contests and promotions
• Campaigns or hashtags
• Grand openings
• Special events
• News and press
• FAQs

To create a new highlight, tap new in the highlights section of your Instagram profile page. Select a few stories to get started, then tap next. Finally, add a title and select a cover image from among the stories you selected. As soon as you tap add in the top right corner, your highlight will appear on your Instagram account.

While your stories are still live on Instagram (within the 24-hour window before they disappear), it’s easy to add them to your highlights. From the homepage of the Instagram app, tap on your profile picture in the top left corner to view your story. Tap the highlight icon in the bottom right of any active story and either select the highlight you want to add the story to or tap new to start a new highlight. That’s it.

Once you’ve created a highlight and posted it on your profile, you can add stories to it even after they’ve expired. From your profile page, tap on the highlight you want to add stories to.Tap the ⋯ more menu in the bottom right corner, then tap edit highlight. Tap the stories tab to view your stories archive; if your Instagram archiving feature was already turned on, you will be able scroll through every Instagram story you’ve ever posted to your account to select the ones you want to add to your highlight. Finally, tap done to add the stories you selected to your highlight.

How To Rearrange Highlights on Instagram

If you have a clear hierarchy of priorities or just a certain flow in mind, you may want to reorder your highlights in a specific way. It’s also common for brands to coordinate the cover images of their highlights to paint a picture or spell out a word, which makes organizing them in a specific order even more important. Trying to edit cover images can help, but that can take a lot of time and effort depending on how many highlights you have.

There is currently no highlights feature that allows you to manually rearrange the order of your Instagram highlights; the app automatically prioritizes the highlight that you updated most recently. Each time you add a new story to an existing Instagram highlight, that highlight automatically becomes first on the list (in order from left to right).

Because they are always ordered chronologically, actively updating and curating your highlights can mess up the order in which they appear. But if you login to Instagram on your iPhone or Android phone, you can use this workaround to reorganize your highlights by using that chronological order to your advantage. Here’s a tutorial on how to rearrange highlights on Instagram in just a few steps:

1. Open Instagram and tap your profile icon in the bottom right corner
2. Tap on the highlight you want to appear last
3. Tap the ⋯ more menu
4. Tap edit highlight
5. Tap the stories tab
6. Select a random story and tap done in the top right (it’s only temporary)
7. The story will re-open automatically; repeat steps 3-4
8. In the selected tab, scroll to the bottom and unselect the story you just added; tap done
9. Repeat as necessary, going in the reverse order (right to left) of how you want your highlights to appear

To get this right, the last highlight you update should be the highlight you want to appear first in the row (reading from left to right). Of course, you can also follow this same step-by-step process to edit your highlights in an effort to keep them fresh, relevant, and on-brand.

Just keep in mind that everytime you update a highlight, it will automatically appear at the top of the list. Removing a story from a highlight doesn’t count as an update, so doing so won’t change the order of your highlights list — only adding a story to the highlight counts as updating it.

Saving UGC In Your Highlights on Instagram

No matter how they’re organized, one of the most popular ways brands use stories is to repost user-generated content. Instead of posting once and forgetting about it, Instagram highlights keep that social proof front and center on your account long after 24 hours.

The only better way to get the most out of your brand’s user-generated content? Archive. Archive is an AI-powered social commerce tool that automatically collects all the UGC that tags your brand in Instagram posts, stories, reels, and TikTok videos.

Once you’re done turning your UGC into stories and curating those stories in Instagram highlights, find all the content your brand is tagged in ready and waiting for you in your very own Archive library. Add labels to organize your content, request Usage Rights directly from influencers, and turn your very best UGC into your next out-of-this-world brand campaign. Get started with a free trial of Archive today.