Instagram Highlights: Snippets of Your School’s ‘WOW’
Since 2016, Instagram has allowed users to post stories, which are publicly available for 24-hours at the top of their profile. This has become a popular feature, with 500 million active users every day. Wish there wasn’t a time limit on how long this content shows on your profile? Then allow us to introduce you to Instagram Highlights!
What are Instagram Highlights?
Highlights are a way of keeping stories on your profile, even after their 24-hour display period has ended. They are then stored in something akin to a folder, which can be named, customised with a thumbnail image, and collated with as many as 100 other stories!
Highlights show just beneath a users’ bio, making them a perfect way to share brand information that you don’t want profile visitors to have to scroll for. They’re also a great way to curate a particular story over time, so Highlights play well into content strategies.
The best part? Instagram Highlights only take a few minutes to set up! From there, all that is required is occasional maintenance, keeping them updated with recent stories so that they showcase the latest content from your school.
Check out Instagram’s official guide on how to create Highlights.
Where do Instagram Highlights sit in a Content Strategy?
It’s worth curating poignant Instagram Highlights to show off the best of your school. They can provide a great opportunity to gradually add to a narrative or progression - for example, if your school has an outdoor area that you’d like to share photos or videos of throughout the seasons, or if you’re building new facilities that you’d like to show the development of.
Using Instagram Highlights effectively within your content strategy simply requires categorising stories into ‘buckets’. This way, your audience can find content they’re looking for really quickly and easily with the benefit of stories being a concise snapshot into life at your school. Be sure to align your Highlights with the school’s strategic goals!
Categories you could create Highlights of include:
Subjects
Months
Year groups
Award ceremonies
Facilities
School trips
A series of student or staff interviews
Boarding
For Highlights to have maximum impact, ensure that:
Your Highlights have a logical structure
You use branded Highlights thumbnails to reinforce your brand
You update your Highlights regularly
Now for some inspiration! Let’s look at some schools using Instagram Highlights in action…
Sherborne Qatar are a fantastic example of a school using Highlights effectively:
Their thumbnails are branded, they’ve collated some of their best stories into categories to display permanently on their profile, and the result is an Instagram profile that offers an authentic glimpse into life at the school!
Westover School are also doing a brilliant job! They’ve creatively categorised their Highlights via month as well as events, allowing a chronological glimpse into stories that have happened:
Pine Crest School have taken an amazing ‘People’ approach, organising their Highlights by who is involved. This means profile visitors can instantly see content from a particular part of their community:
Finally, The Royal Hospital School has used stand-out thumbnails containing the title of each Highlight in their brand colours and font, making it fast to find stories of a particular category.
That’s Instagram Highlights! A fantastic way to collate past Instagram stories so they can feature in a permanent place on your profile.
Need more support? Our Digital Storytellers would love to support you with your social media content strategy, including how to involve Instagram Highlights.
For more information, or to discuss your #ContentStrategy, reach out to the Storytelling team ➡️ schoolbyt.es/hello