Instagram has been busy this year – it feels like most of the posts in our social media category have been talking about a new Instagram feature brought out! Instagram’s Stories feature has been a huge hit, and these new features are just Instagram building on that.
The first new feature that you’ve probably not noticed yet but has been working away for you is the Stories archive. We’ve covered before about how Instagram has an archive feature for those images in your feed that you don’t want to delete but that might not fit with the rest of your feed. This has now expanded to take a copy of your Instagram Stories if you don’t opt out – if you just clicked OK when the popup appeared around 5th December (when the feature was introduced) then it’s been working away automatically for you. If there’s nothing in your archive at the moment, then double check it in your settings. Each archived story will show you who saw the story and will allow you to download it or add to your highlights.
The other new feature is the Stories Highlights feature. You’re now able to keep chosen stories around for longer than 24 hours on your profile – you can add anything from your current Stories or from your Archive. There’s no limit to the amount of highlights you add to your profile, and you can group a few Stories together as one highlight. Once you’ve chosen the Stories for one highlight, you’ll be prompted to give it a title and choose a cover which is what people will see when the visit your profile. There are so many ways to use this feature – if you’re a beauty blogger who does tutorials in your Stories, then you could group together all the Stories relating to one look. Fashion bloggers could do a weekly collection of what they’ve worn. Food bloggers could group all Stories as a highlight of a specific meal – it’s probably the most useful new feature Instagram has brought in since, well, Stories!
