5 things you aren’t doing with Instagram Highlights

An often underutilized part of Instagram is the highlights section. Those 1920x1080 vertical format videos or pictures are like hanging up the best of your work on the fridge for everyone to see. Giving each highlight a theme is the name of the game, that way you can tailor the experience and folks looking over your content know precisely what they’re looking in on. Here are a couple of Highlight themes to get you started:

1. Making Tutorials
DIY projects are a great way to build, repair, or create things without the help of an expert. Rather than read a boring instruction manual. Highlights can be used to provide tutorials for your fans about exciting projects they can work on.

Here is an example from buzzfeedtasty and how they provided links to interesting food prep tutorials.

2. Communicating Your Goals
If you look around your home, chances are your oven, refrigerator, washing machine/dryer or the lightbulb lighting your room is a product of General Electric. GE uses its highlights to build a culture around its products, over the decades they’ve made their way into homes with reliable tech, now they’re focusing on telling the story behind it.

GE’s Instagram highlights communicate the companies goals.

3. Giveaways
What could be more exciting to your visitors than the opportunity to win a prize for completing a challenge or entering sweepstakes? Using your highlights to promote a giveaway has the following benefits. It helps spread the word about your organization, it encourages participants to learn more about what you do and it helps strengthen the bond between you and your fans.

This is how brailleskate used their highlights to encourage visitors to join a giveaway.

4. Fan Promotion
It can be a challenge when you’re trying to think of ideas to promote your organization, but maybe you don’t have to be the one doing the promoting. Have your fans do the promoting for you. Whether you sell clothes or cosmetics, your visitors are going to love seeing your fans using your product/service or whatever you offer.

soapandgloryusa used their highlights to show how much their fans are loving their new lines of makeup.

5. Social Links
I am sure your Instagram account is kicking butt by now, but maybe your visitors want to get to know a little more about your company. Instagram is a great tool to connect with your audience, but it’s not the only one out there. Use highlights to promote your other social channels, which will help you gain extra followers.

Fortnite gamer dakotaz uses his highlights to link to his Youtube, Twitch and Twitter account.

These were my five tips on how you can use highlights to improve your Instagram marketing. There are a bunch of creative ways to use highlights for an organization, find out what works best for you. I hope you found this article helpful and be sure to check out Rocket & Mouse if your organization needs help with their social media marketing.