Highlights: the only way a Story becomes permanent, and your profile's menu

Highlights sit in a row of circles at the top of the profile, between the bio and the post grid. Each one is a collection grouping as many Stories as you want, in the order they were published.

There is exactly one difference from a regular Story, and it is decisive: the Story vanishes in 24 hours, the highlight never vanishes until you remove it.

Because they occupy the space right below the bio, they are read alongside it. Someone arriving at the profile processes picture, name, bio and highlights as a single block. That makes them part of conversion, not decoration.

There are two routes, and the second is the one almost nobody knows:

• From a live Story. On the Story itself, the highlight option creates the collection or adds to an existing one.
• From the archive. On the profile, when creating a new highlight, the app opens your archive of old Stories. That lets you build an entire highlight without posting anything to Stories now.

That second route answers the most searched question about the feature, which is how to add to a highlight without putting it on your story. The automatic archive has to be on, otherwise there is no history to pull from.

The cover is editable and the name holds few characters, which matters more than it seems: a name that does not fit gets cut and becomes a riddle.

This is where the most common confusion lives. The viewer list exists, but it belongs to the original Story rather than the highlight, and it disappears 48 hours after that Story was published.

In practice: for the first two days you see who watched; after that, whoever opens your highlight watches without leaving a trace for you. The view counter keeps running, it is the named list that ends.

That answers the two questions that always come up. Can you tell who viewed? Only inside the initial window. Does someone who opened an old highlight show up for me? No.

Think restaurant menu, not photo album. Whatever drives the purchase goes there:

• Pricing and how it works. The question that arrives most in Direct deserves a highlight, not the same answer typed a hundred times.
• Proof. Testimonials, results, before and after.
• Frequent questions. Each common objection becomes a frame.
• Who I am. For a personal account, an introduction highlight does the work the bio has no room for.

Less is more: five well named highlights work better than twenty, because only the first few appear without scrolling sideways.

• My highlights answer what people ask me most in Direct.
• The names fit whole, with no truncation.
• The first ones in the row are the ones that matter most.
• I know how to build a highlight from the archive, without posting to Stories.
• I do not treat highlights as a scrapbook.