Instagram is a great social media platform with over 1 billion users that you can market your business to. But with millions of businesses all competing for their attention you need to ensure the caption of your posts attracts them instantly.
What makes a great Instagram caption?
A great Instagram caption will add context and show off your brand’s personality, entertain the audience and persuade them to take action. Captions can be up to 2,200 characters long and contain 30 hashtags. However just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Captions should be short and concise trying to grab the audience’s attention further than the post itself. Here is top tips on how to write a great caption to boost engagement.
1. Know your audience
You need to find out what sectors you want to target, this includes geographical location, demographics hobbies and interests etc. The best way to ensure your posts are targeting the correct audience is by creating audience personas, this will outline your target customers and what you need to do to entice them.
Once you have your target audience you need to ask yourself:
- Will the target audience understand this?
- Is the use of emojis and hashtags appropriate?
- Does the caption relate to the post?
2. Identify your brands personality
People want to feel a connection so it is important to humanize your brand and create a personality. You need to come across as human in your posts, show emotion and further increase engagement with your audience.
Instagram users don’t expect a formal or serious tone in posts, add humor, show personality and most importantly connect with your audience.
3. Consider length
Remember when scrolling through Instagram most of us do it at a fast pace, if we see a post that instantly attracts our attention we will stop and look at it in more detail. This is when your caption comes in, if you have a long clustered caption your audience will be less likely to read it and take action.
However like everything it will depend on your audience, if it is a information based page you have then longer captions may work to help educate your audience or/and explain your post.
4. Edit and Rewrite
Take your time and be careful when creating a caption. Go through several drafts, especially if your captions are several lines long. Good writing will take multiple drafts and edits until you construct the perfect caption.
Make sure it is relative to your content and remove any words that don’t add value to your post. Use someone else to proof read your post, a fresh pair of eyes will interpret the content in a different tone and pick up any mistakes you may have missed.
5. Use Hashtags
It is recommended you use hashtags to target your audience and create a thread of relative posts.
Don’t add too many hashtags as they will clutter your posts and detract from your message.
If you want to include hashtags you can hide them by separating them from the caption by including a series of line breaks. This will keep your posts looking clean but also keep your posts appearing in relative feeds.
Another method that can be used to ‘hide’ hashtags is by commenting on your post with the right after you post.
6. Ask Questions
One of the best way to increase engagement on your posts is to ask a question in your post. This will increase the number of comments on your post with people responding to the caption.
Make the audience feel valued, ask for their opinion and respond or interact with their comments.
7. Encourage engagement with a call to action
The primary focus of a businesses posts is to drive engagement, invite people to interact with your post. This can be in the form of asking them to leave a comment, tag a friend or provide their opinion.
It is crucial that you are posting high quality content when asking for engagement, poor content can result in silent return which will look poorly on your brand.
8. Use quotes
Use quotes, but ensure they are relative to the post and not over the top cliché. Go-pro is a great example of an account that uses quotes from it user generated content.
Now you know how to write the perfect Instagram caption, get uploading and increase engagement with your audience.
