Writing Instagram captions can be really, really hard! Writing great ones is even harder. You’ve created such great content that you want the perfect Instagram caption to go with it, the kind that is concise, yet adds to your content, and, most important of all, is engaging.
This blog is here to help you with that! Here are some tips on creating engaging Instagram captions.
Know Your Audience
To write an engaging Instagram caption you need to know your audience well enough to know what kind of caption would engage them specifically.
“The better you know your audience, the easier it is to tailor your Instagram marketing strategy to their needs and expectations. / To that end, we recommend building audience personas. These archetypes outline basic details about your target customers, their goals, and their pain points.” – Hootsuite
When you know who, exactly, you’re speaking to, you’re able to better understand what kind of information you can put in your captions. If it’s a reference, will your audience understand it? Would your audience require more context to the image you’re posting? Would they answer a question if you asked it?
Use a Call-to-Action
A call-to-action definitely helps the engagement on your post. In fact, the entire purpose of a call-to-action is to encourage engagement. But what is a call-to-action?
A call-to-action, or CTA, is a term used for something that prompts people into immediate action towards something like social media content, advertisements, blog posts, etc.
In your Instagram caption, it should be directly related to whatever the post is about. For example, in this post about the “Most Important People Skills Needed for a Thriving Remote Culture” from the Like A Voss Instagram, at the end of the caption a CTA was placed. It said, “What are some other people skills you would add to this list?” This is both directly related to the content posted as well as asked a compelling question that people answered in the comments.
“Not only will this [Call-to-Actions] strengthen the sense of community on your Instagram account, but it will also provide positive indicators for the Instagram algorithm — which will lead to more exposure for your post.” – Later
The Importance of Spacing
If you’re saying a lot in your Instagram caption, it’s very important that you divide it into a bunch of smaller paragraphs.
“Writing a great caption, in terms of copy, context, and value, is important on Instagram. But if your caption is one long paragraph, chances are your audience won’t read much of it. Instead, divide your text into short paragraphs with extra spacing to make the content easier to read and help increase activity on CTAs.” – Social Media Examiner
A bunch of smaller paragraphs is a lot more interesting and visually appealing than one long paragraph. It gives each part more importance instead of all your information and your CTA seeming smushed together. It also makes people a lot more willing to read it all. One long paragraph is much less likely to get read than a few short ones because it seems like too much to read. It could be the exact same word count as the short paragraphs combined, but it would still seem too long for people to care. The appearance of words actually plays a large role in how people will read it.
Where to Put the Hashtags
The final question in creating your caption is, “Where should I put my hashtags?” That question is actually a lot more complicated than it seems. In short, most of the time it’s actually better to include your hashtags in the first comment rather than the caption. Still, it’s not that simple.
Check out this blog where the pros and cons of hashtags in the caption vs the first comment is discussed.
Writing the perfect Instagram caption can seem daunting, but once you learn the tips and tricks and put them to action, it will eventually become a habit. You’ve got this!
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