What are Instagram Highlights and how to create them easy & free with Canva?

6 months ago

If you are using Instagram, you may have noticed 'highlights' in some users posts, right between their bio and their Insta-feed.

I assume you know that every Insta-story you upload is active only for 24 hours, right?

Well at some point, there was a need to keep those stories active for much longer. And then, Instagram Highlights were created.
They are a very important feature, that allows the users to save Instagram stories on their profile for longer than 24 hours. The user can create different categories of Highlights and customize their covers and names.

This is a perfect way to showcase your best stories, by category, to your followers and profile visitors.

In this post we will learn how to create our own custom highlight covers - easy and free, using Canva!

These are the highlights in my profile now.

They do not look so nice, I have not set custom highlight covers, I have used photos of my stories as their covers.

However, if you are using Instagram for more professional reasons, you could consider creating custom highlights - as per your brand colors.

To do that, you can simply sign up (or use) Canva and search "Instagram Highlights"

You will see many different profiles, both free to use and paid.

For the needs of this post, I will use a template and create one highlight!
To do that, you will need to upload a story, add it to an existing highlight (or create a new one) and then set it as cover.

This is the one I chose to use