SOCIAL MEDIA ALERT: INSTAGRAM ROLLS OUT HIGHLIGHTS
Do you remember your company’s official brand launch that effortlessly engaged both your target audience and stakeholders? If so, you also remember how your social media manager flawlessly captured it for all your Instagram followers through Stories, and how it faded away after 24 hours.
But that’s an issue of the past. Now you can revisit impactful memories with Stories Highlights. Beginning last month, the feature allows you to group stories you’ve shared into highlights and feature them on your profile. You can choose any stories from your archive, select a cover for your highlight and even name it. The highlight will appear as a circle on your profile that plays as a stand-alone story when someone taps it.
Check out three important value adds that Highlights can bring to your brand.
- ENGAGE FOLLOWERS WHILE FURTHER MEETING THEIR NEEDS
Traditional Instagram posts have always been the backbone of the social media platform. But the delicate balance between oversharing and under sharing the right number of images for an individual campaign is consistently a challenge. Brands walk a fine line between ensuring that followers receive message points and bombarding timelines, which can lead to the cringeworthy unfollow.
Highlights solves this conundrum by encouraging followers to explore content in an organic way based on their interest. They can navigate through Highlights by selecting what they want to intake and leave the rest on the table. It puts more control into the viewers hands and less pressure on the brand to ensure they are posting enough on the traditional grid.
- CREATE MORE AUTHENTIC CONTENT
Bill Gates’ declaration still rings true: content is king. Highlights hits on the simple fact that you can share more content. Does your organization have a national footprint? The feature is beneficial for multiple editors, potentially ones in different location, who have slightly different aesthetics but want to share an authentic representation of their area. Audiences can gain a better sense of who you are as a whole and within various regions, while rewarding curation and niche content. For these large brands, this may mean corporate can manage the home screen while individual areas can control Stories Highlights. This will lead to a higher level of authenticity while accommodating both corporations and their publics.
For businesses that host or sponsor a lot of events, they can create a new highlight for each one to showcase community involvement two months from now, rather than relying on advertisements or single posts in a traditional gram that gets lost in the shuffle.
- AMPLIFY PRODUCT AND PROMOTION ROLLOUTS
New product launches come with a distinct need to spread the word and create buzz. You want the latest and greatest represented well and represented often. Part of this formula is sharing through social media, and specifically onto Stories; but with a 24-hour time cap, the hard work and time spent seems wasteful.
Highlights provides further reasoning to invest time into Stories and translates inherently to investors. Even better, you can create product-specific collections to show all the latest feature upgrades through visual storytelling in an organized fashion.
If Instagram hasn’t grabbed your attention yet, it’s time to watch closely and heavily consider creating an account for your business to reach the 500 million daily active users.
Can’t quite wrap your head around social strategy and how to effectively utilize new tools? Let us know; we’re happy to lead the way.
