Instagram May Soon Let You Add A Location Tag & Hashtags To Story Highlights

Source: Jane Manchun Wong

Instagram’s Story Highlights, a feature that allows you to save Stories even after they have disappeared and add them to your profile, is one of my favorite features on the Facebook-owned app. As someone who takes a significant amount of photos when I’m traveling or in the outdoors, it gives me the ability to share curated content via Stories that I don’t want to share in-feed but still save it somewhere else for others to view at a later date.

According to a recent screenshot (see above) shared by Jane Manchung Wong, Instagram is working on the ability for users to add a location tag and hashtags to Story Highlights. From what we can see, it looks like when you create a new Story Highlight, there will be the option to add a location tag in a similar fashion to how you would add one for an in-feed post as well as the ability to search and add up to four hashtags.

Insights & Analysis:

Since launching Story Highlights at the end of 2017, Instagram surprisingly hasn’t made any significant updates to the highly underrated feature. Despite testing and experimenting with new features on what seems to be a weekly basis, it’s no guarantee that Instagram will roll this out, but taking into consideration of how much the app has talked about Stories playing a significant role in its future, it’s a safe bet that it will be coming down the road.

Being able to add a location tag and hashtags for Story Highlights will add more fire power to the feature, which is already great for storytelling and sharing curated content. The “add up to 4 hashtags to make your Highlights easier to search” language that is displayed under the hashtags option in the screenshot gives me a feeling that Story Highlights will become searchable and will appear under the specific location and hashtags that are added to it, making it possible for users to come across Story Highlights when searching locations and hashtags vs. having to be a specific user’s profile.

If this is true, then it’s likely Story Highlights potentially could also appear in the Explore tab, joining in-feed, Story and IGTV posts, and ultimately increasing the discoverability of content that is saved as part of a Story Highlight.

If you’re someone like me, who creates a lot Story Highlights, then let’s hope this feature does arrive and let’s hope it’s sooner than later.

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