Instagram story highlight icons are your Instagram business profile’s secret weapon.
With more than 200 million users visiting at least a business profile each day, Instagram is more than just a social network—it’s your brand’s digital storefront.
But similar to a messy store does not give the best first impression to your customers, a disorganized Instagram profile looks unprofessional and lazy.
In this post, we will discover how you could use icons for your Instagram story highlights to make your Instagram profile look pro and showcase the most effective of your brand. As a thank you to our dedicated readers, we will additionally provide you with a designer pack of Instagram story highlight icons that will increase the look of your profile right away.
If only all renovations were this simple.
What are Instagram Story Highlight icons?
Instagram launched Stories Highlights in December 2017 to allow customers like you “hold on to your favorite moments from Instagram Stories and share them in ways that assist you to express yourself.”
Since then, brands have discovered many creative methods to share the best of their stories. One effective method has been with the use of “covers” or “icons.”
You have probably seen those visually-appealing icons popping up on the profiles of your favorite Instagram users—and for good reason.
Brands and influencers like Alexandra Grant of Monika Hibbs, To Vogue or Bust, and home and garden website Jungalow use covers for their Instagram Story Highlights to showcase their brand and bring added value to their viewers.
As you could see, utilizing covers with appropriate icons make these profiles simpler to navigate—and their content simpler to seek out and engage with.
Why brands should use Instagram Story Highlights
Increase the longevity of your content
Instagram Story Highlights lets your brand showcase your greatest Stories and post them permanently on your Instagram profile.
As explained in our post 14 interesting new things to try on social media in 2018, “This function is super valuable for brands because, not like self-destructing Story content, Stories Highlights could be saved, reposted, and measured for long-term performance.”
Which means content like a question and answer session you do with your followers could live permanently on your profile as an FAQ, so you are not wasting time constantly explaining the same things over and over again.
Drive more traffic to your site
Since you could share unlimited links in your Stories with the “swipe up” function, Highlights allows you to drive more traffic to your site.
This lets you direct your audience to external pages. Giving one use-case example, AdWeek explains, “Marketers could link to lead-generation types from their respective email marketing software and boom, your email list is going off the roof.”
Whether you are attempting to increase sales by linking to a product page or rising your email list, Highlights permit you to host these valuable links for as long as your business needs.
Establish a solid brand
By including covers or icons to your Instagram Story Highlights, you show your audience that your business is dedicated to creating their experience as elevated as possible.
Clear and compelling covers and icons are an effective way to provide visitors to your profile a quick take a look at what they could expect from your brand. How do you want potential customers to see your brand—disorganized and cluttered, or sleek and thoughtful?
While other businesses may have Instagram Story Highlights if they do not have clear categories with associated icons they aren’t making it simple for the audience to navigate their content.
Having aesthetically-pleasing and relevant Instagram Story Highlight icons and covers will help set your brand apart from your competition—and positively impact your audience’s experience with your business.
How to create your own Instagram Story Highlight icons
Instagram Story Highlights covers could simply be customized to reflect your brand and business needs with Canva, a desktop, and mobile graphic design tool.
To make this even simpler for you, our designers created a free download of 30 professional icons and covers:
Download your free pack of 30 customizable Instagram Story Highlights Icons now. Optimize your profile and set your brand apart from the competition.
Right here’s the way to customize these icons and covers to for your brand.
1. Open the Canva desktop version by going to the Canva website.
2. Under the ‘Create a design’ section, choose ‘Use custom dimensions.’
3. Enter 1080 as the value in the first box, and 1920 as the value in the second box. Be sure the value is measured in ‘px’ and click on the green ‘Design!’ button.
4. Now that you have your template ready, open and upload the icons we provided. Either drag and drop the .PNG file from the folder, or locate it manually.
5. To locate manually, click on the ‘Uploads’ icon on the left toolbar, then choose the grey icon labeled ‘Uploads’ and click on the green ‘Upload your own photos’ button.
6. Locate the icons folder, choose the 1_icononly file and choose the icon you want to make the cover with. (Tip: The files might look blank, however, it’s because they’re transparent.)
7. To add a background color or pattern of your choice, choose the ‘Bkground’ option from the left toolbar. Select a color or pattern.
8. To make more covers (recommended), click on the ‘+Add a new page’ button below your picture and repeat steps Four via 7 until you have your desired number of covers.
9. You are ready to download your new Instagram Story Highlights icons! Click on the ‘Download’ button at the top of the page and select the format you want (PNG or JPG file). Transfer them to your phone through your desired method.
10. When you have the covers saved on your phone, add them to your Instagram Story. It’s also a superb time to ensure your Instagram Story archive is turned on.
11. Turn on your Instagram Story archive by going to your settings, clicking ‘Story Settings’ and scrolling down to the ‘Save to Archive’ selection and switching it on.
12. Now that that’s ready, add your highlights covers to your Instagram Story.
13. After you have your covers up on your Instagram Story, click on the ‘Highlight’ little heart icon in the bottom right corner.
14. If you click on ‘Highlight,’ you could either add the post to an existing Highlight or make a new one.
15. Repeat until you have all your desired covers added.
16. To edit, add to, or remove a Highlight, click on the ‘More’ ellipsis in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture.
Now that you have uploaded all of your Instagram Story Highlights icons, your profile is displaying off your greatest content and your brand—similar to @gloridays is doing below.
