Today, I’m going to share with you just a few tips for how to create Instagram Highlights. Now, a few of you might be watching this going Highlights, what is she talking about?
Highlights are those little circles you probably have seen on some people’s Instagram accounts. If you look at my Instagram account, I have these little red circles across the top of my Instagram account that say things like family, video, podcast. And when you click on those, what you’re seeing are different pieces of content.
So, I want to talk a little bit about how they got there, how to get them there, and what it’s all about.
To create Highlights on your Instagram channel, you have to first start by creating Instagram Stories. So, once you start creating Instagram Stories, and if you’re not doing this yet, a story can simply be a photo, or it could be a 15 second video, you could add multiple pieces to your Instagram Story. I know for me, a lot of times my Instagram Story is 5, 10, 15, 20 pieces long, and that’s fine.
But, your Instagram Story is here today, and it expires in 24 hours. So, it’s great for content that’s just in the moment. It’s meant to be content that is kind of behind the scenes, doesn’t have to be perfect, and we’re seeing a lot of people getting a lot of traction on Instagram Stories. That’s a whole other video. However, once you start to create Instagram Stories, after you’ve posted that story, at the bottom of your Instagram Stories is a little button, and it says Add to Highlight.
So, once you click that button, it will ask you what highlight do you want it to go to. Now, if you’ve already created your highlights, you can just add it to whatever highlight you’d like to add it to. But, if you haven’t, you can start to categorize some of your Instagram Stories content.
So for example, if you’re doing some Instagram Story around home buyers, or working with sellers, or maybe you love wine like I do, or whatever it might be, you can start to categorize some of your content into specific highlights over on to Instagram.
Now, you could also go back into your archive. So, if you don’t have any recent Instagram Stories, as an admin to your own account, you can go into Instagram, look at the archive of your Instagram Stories, and go through and start to pick out older Instagram Stories that you’d like to add over to your highlights.
So, you might be listening to this going okay, that sounds great. I understand how to do it, but why would I do it? The reason for the why is because as you start to grow your Instagram account, and you start liking and commenting and interacting with other people who may not be following you, usually their response is to go to your Instagram account to see who you are, right?
So, let’s say you want to start connecting with people locally to you. And so you start reaching out, and connecting with people who might be local dog lovers, or they’re in your local community, and you’re connecting with them on Instagram. So, they go over to your Instagram profile, and they see your picture. They see your bio, which is important. But, your highlights are one other way for people to really get a sense of who you are, personally and professionally.
I want to give two examples of two people in our #GetSocialSmart Academy who I think are doing a really great job of this. The first is Frankie Joel. So, Frankie is a real estate professional. He’s also a speaker. And if you look at his Instagram profile, you’ll see his highlights, and he has things on his account like travel, podcasting, speaking. The second one is Nora Lynch. Nora Lynch is in our #GetSocialSmart Academy. She’s also one of our Masterminders, and if you look at her Instagram account, she has some great examples of what to do when it comes to Instagram Stories.
So, she’s got some things like realtor, she’s got an Instagram Highlight for homes, for landmark, her company. She even has one for Lady Gaga, for a fun concert she went to. So, it’s a great way to highlight who you are personally as well as professionally. The other thing that I love about Instagram Highlights is that those highlights are permanent on your account. They’re permanent.
So, while Instagram Stories are here today and gone in 24 hours, you can take some of that content, and put some permanence to it, right? And what happens is now, your channel becomes kind of like Netflix, in the sense that when people come to your account, and if they want to find out more about you, and they like what you have to say, they’re going to start to kind of binge watch some of your content, specifically your highlights content. And when people start to interact with you more on your profile, they’re more likely to see your content. They’re more likely to keep coming back.
Your content’s more likely to get seen in their news feed. Now, if you’ve been on my Instagram account, you’ve seen that my highlights are red. They’re branded to our red color, so we just did that through Canva. You can go to canva.com, and you want to look for the template that says Instagram stories, and you can create a really simple template. We just searched for some free icons. You can put icons in there. You can add some color.
And then, what you’re going to want to do is save those to your phone, upload those into Instagram stories, and then once they’re on Instagram stories, they can hit that little highlight button, and you can add them to your highlights. And again, you can call your highlights whatever you’d like them to be, so you might have one for buyers, sellers. You might have one for all of your sold listings. If you’re doing a lot of community content, you might have one that just says community. You might have one like me that says family, if you highlight some things that you do as a family here and there.
I would recommend that you think about who you are personally and professionally, have a nice mix of both. Okay. I would love to hear from you. Are you using Instagram Highlights? Let me know yes or no in the comments below. And if you’re active on Instagram, put your handle in the comments of the video. I’d love to connect with you over on Instagram!
By the way, if you’re listening to this going, “Okay, that all sounds great, Katie, but I really need to get my Instagram strategy together in general,” we have a great free download for you. If you go to Katielance.com/InstaGuide it’s our free Instagram guide to real estate, and it’s chock full with lots of tips, tools, and strategies on how to think about Instagram content, Instagram Stories, everything to do with Instagram when it comes to Instagram for real estate.
