How to Create Story Highlights That Actually Get Tapped

Highlights sit directly under the bio, which makes them one of the first things a new visitor actually taps — often before they've seen a single feed post. Most accounts waste that placement on a row of mismatched, unlabeled circles left over from whatever Stories happened to exist when they first tried the feature.

Treat Highlights as a second navigation menu

A visitor who taps a Highlight is doing something more deliberate than someone scrolling the feed — they're actively looking for a specific kind of information. Structure Highlights around the questions a new visitor actually has: what do you do, what have you made, how do people work with you, what do others say about you. A generic "Fun stuff" or "Misc" Highlight answers none of those and gets skipped.

Highlights don't need to be permanent to be worth making

Not every Highlight has to be a fixture forever — a time-limited campaign, a seasonal promotion, or an event recap can live as a temporary Highlight and be removed once it's no longer relevant, without that removal feeling like neglect the way an outdated permanent Highlight does. Treating some Highlights as intentionally temporary, alongside a smaller set of permanent ones, keeps the row current without requiring a full audit every time something becomes outdated.

Highlights are also a search-adjacent surface

A visitor arriving from a search, a mention, or a shared link — someone with zero context on the account — relies on Highlights more heavily than a follower who already knows the account's history. That makes clear, descriptive naming (not cute or vague titles) worth prioritizing over aesthetic consistency alone: a Highlight labeled "FAQ" does more work for a cold visitor than one labeled with an emoji or an inside reference only existing followers would understand.

A structure that covers most accounts

• About / Start Here — a quick intro for someone who just found the account.
• Work / Portfolio — the actual output, curated, not everything ever posted.
• Reviews / Results — social proof, screenshots of feedback, before/after content.
• FAQ — the questions that come up repeatedly in DMs, answered once instead of every time.
• Behind the scenes — the process content that builds familiarity without cluttering the main Highlights row.

Five or six Highlights is a reasonable ceiling — beyond that, the row starts requiring a horizontal scroll on most screens, and anything past what's visible without scrolling gets a fraction of the taps the first few get.

Covers matter more than most people think

A Highlight cover is a small, low-resolution circle, which means it needs to communicate at a glance rather than through detail — a single bold icon or a cropped, high-contrast image works better than a busy photo that reads as a blur at that size. Consistency across covers (same color background, same icon style) is what makes a Highlights row look designed rather than assembled piecemeal over time, and it's a much smaller effort than it looks: one simple template applied to every cover.

Curate, don't archive everything

A Highlight isn't an archive — adding every Story ever posted to a Highlight defeats the purpose, since a visitor tapping in expects a focused answer, not a scroll through months of unrelated content. Review and prune Highlights periodically the same way you'd edit a resume: keep what's still accurate and relevant, remove what's outdated, and keep each Highlight short enough that someone actually finishes watching it.

Order matters as much as content

Highlights display left to right in whatever order they were most recently updated, unless manually rearranged — which means the row can drift into a sequence that has nothing to do with priority. Manually ordering Highlights so the most important one (usually the About/Start Here equivalent) sits first ensures the highest-value content gets seen even by a visitor who only taps one before moving on, rather than leaving that to whichever Highlight happened to get a Story added to it most recently.

Update them like a page, not a museum

Highlights that haven't changed in over a year read as an abandoned account to a visitor doing due diligence, even if the feed itself is active. Treating Highlights as a living, periodically refreshed part of the profile — not a one-time setup task — is what keeps that first-impression real estate actually working for the account.