Join us to write a great Instagram caption that will appeal to the audience.
Instagram is all about quality photos, right? Well, yes, but not completely! Even though Instagram is the only image-based social network, once you’ve taken the best photo and edited it with the best filter, you’re not done until you can find a great caption to add content and meaning to your photo. Yes, your Instagram caption is almost as important as the content itself, quality content drives traffic, and quality captions do the same. The problem is, that writing good Instagram captions can be hard.
What tone should your captions have? Should you include a call to action or an emoji? What to do about hashtags? What makes a good Instagram caption? If you’re looking for tips on how to write great captions for Instagram, today is your day! In this article, we will talk about several tips for writing interesting captions on Instagram.
Table of Contents
10 steps to write an attractive Instagram caption
1- Know your audience
First of all, do you know who you are talking to? If not, we suggest that you start by creating your audience personas; Fictional characters, based on real data and market research, that represent different categories of your target audience.
In this section, you will find several questions to ask yourself to determine who your audience is:
In what age range are they?
where do they live?
What is their job?
What do they do in their free time?
What goals are they trying to achieve?
You can also run surveys on your Instagram account and analyze your current followers by accessing the information provided by Instagram. Just go to the Insights section and then Audience to see different demographics and activity data in this section.
The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be for you to create Instagram captions that meet their needs and expectations.
2- Identify your brand voice and use it
In addition to having an accurate knowledge of the target audience, you must know how you want to move towards them. Of course, there are different ways to communicate with women in the age range of 30-45 years and men of 18-25 years. That’s why you should know your audience, the better you know, the better you can talk to them and convey your message to them in the right tone.
Each brand has its personality, style, and tone of voice, just as each social network is unique. You don’t use the same text on LinkedIn as you do on Instagram, right? This is why you need to match your brand voice with your Instagram captions. Use an informational and informal tone (if possible for your brand) to show your audience how authentic and human your brand is, which is also a great way to generate engagement with your posts.
3- Write your first line attractively
You certainly know that Instagram is optimized for the mobile experience. Did you know that this means that only the first 125 characters of your Instagram caption will be displayed in users’ feeds? However, that doesn’t mean you have to cut your Instagram captions too short. Instead, put your important content and call-to-action at the beginning of the text, and mentions and hashtags at the end of the text.
Remember that you have to attract the attention of the audience! For this, you need to make the first line of your Instagram caption highly engaging. You can arouse users’ curiosity by saying something very stimulating to click and read more, or by using questions, interesting statements, and special offers to attract their attention.
Whatever strategy you choose, you should keep in mind that the goal is to create attention and curiosity in users so that they are more likely to read the full caption and interact with your posts.
4- Consider the structure of your caption
As mentioned above, Instagram only allows you to see the first 125 characters of text, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid writing longer captions.
Short and catchy captions can be a great option if they suit your target audience, but if you want to write longer captions, here are some formatting tips you can follow to make them easier to read. :
Write your Instagram captions in a text program: If you use the Instagram app to write captions, any formatting will be removed after you write your text and press Done. That’s why we suggest you draft your Instagram caption in your phone’s Note or text typing programs so that you can put spaces between paragraphs.
Don’t use emojis before or after paragraphs: If you want to use emojis in your Instagram captions, don’t do it before or after paragraphs. Note that if you use an emoji as the last character in your paragraph, the line spacing will be lost. Adding punctuation marks after the emoji can solve this problem. Therefore, placing a period exclamation mark question mark, and other symbols after an emoji preserves the line spacing.
5- Use calls to action to generate traffic and engagement
The best way to engage with your audience and increase your Instagram potential is to include a call to action in your Instagram caption. Since Instagram limits clickable links to only the bio section of your Instagram profile, make sure you encourage your followers to visit your website or take another action through your captions.
On Instagram, the most common call to action is “link in bio”, but there are still plenty of good calls to action that you can use.
1- Tags: Encourage followers to share your post by inviting them to tag their friends below the post. This is a great tactic to increase your reach and follower count. This method is also a great way to generate interest in a contest if you like to interact with your community in this way.
2- Questions: Asking your followers a question can be a great way to engage. Ask them to leave comments under your posts, you can use their responses to find new ideas for content.
3- Repost: Now on Instagram you can share any content you see in Instagram stories. You can make the most of this feature by including a call to action and asking your audience to share your post in your story. Before using this call to action, make sure it aligns with the template of the post you want to share.
4- Contest: Contests are a great way to increase engagement and brand awareness on social networks. After all, everyone wants a chance to win something! When you run a contest, how do you get people involved? That’s right, by telling them to participate in this contest, that too using Instagram captions!
Contests are the best way to generate more interaction and reach for your Instagram posts, because in addition to leaving comments under your posts, most of the time, your followers need to tag their friends, which can increase your reach. or triple slow. To make your call to action more effective, tell your followers why they should follow your call to action, this will encourage them to take action and help you achieve your goals.
6- Use hashtags carefully
Increasing engagement is important, but we also want to get more followers, right? Adding hashtags to your Instagram captions is a great way to achieve this.
Instagram captions with at least one hashtag have 12.6% more engagement than posts without hashtags. Now that Instagram users can follow specific hashtags, using them in captions is more important than ever.
By following hashtags, users can see your posts in their feeds even if they don’t follow you. However, to successfully use hashtags in Instagram captions, you need to be strategic. You cannot use all the popular hashtags in your post to reach the largest number of Instagram users; You might get some more likes this way, but it won’t help your growth and reach in the long run.
Instead, find related hashtags. You can choose from branded and unbranded hashtags or even better, a combination of them. Branded hashtags are great for building a relationship with your community and spreading the word about your business. Whether it’s just your brand name or the name of one of your campaigns or products, using branded hashtags can increase engagement with your posts and bring you more quality followers.
Even though using hashtags in your Instagram captions is a smart move, make sure you use them carefully. Too many hashtags can make your caption look spammy. Although Instagram allows you to use up to 30 hashtags per post, we recommend that you use a maximum of 7 hashtags per post.
7- Use emojis
When used correctly, emojis are a great way to add personality to your captions. Choose emojis that are relevant to your post and make sure they match your tone of voice and brand.
There are many ways to use emojis in captions, such as:
At the beginning of your Instagram caption to attract the attention of your audience
To replace the words
Emojis have a lot more benefits than just making your captions prettier. Encourage your community to interact with your account with smart and creative use of emojis.
8- Write several drafts
Have you ever thought of the best joke when it was too late? We’ve all had that feeling when we published our post about the best caption. What lesson can be learned from this? Never rush your process. Instead, write down some ideas for captions, think about them a bit, ask your colleagues which one is best, and take your time.
You may ask yourself in this section, isn’t being on time and timing important for Instagram? Of course, they can be important, depending on the subject of the post you are publishing. For example, Patrick Janelle, a professional Instagrammer, says that he uses Instagram as a time travel for his activities and lifestyle. He likes to post in real time to document what he is doing at the moment.
Of course, given the impending changes to Instagram’s feed algorithm, the level of engagement your posts receive will soon become more important than timeliness. Soon, our Instagram feeds will be organized to show us the moments that mean the most to us on Instagram. The visibility of your posts in the feed of your followers depends on the number of likes and comments that the post has and your relationship with the person posting and other things.
That’s why it’s so important to take the time to create a good caption that engages your followers and compels them to share and interact with your post.
9- Introduce your channels on other social networks
You can also use Instagram captions to introduce your accounts on other social networks. This is a great way to tell your followers what other social networks they can find you on so that your Instagram followers can reach your followers on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and other social networks.
If you have a Snapchat account, Snapcodes are great for promoting other channels on other social networks. Every Snapchat user has their own unique Snapcode, which is a photo that looks like the Snapchat logo but with a unique dot pattern. To follow you on Snapchat, all users have to do is open the app, take a picture of your snap code, and tap the screen.
10- Plan for the future
Do you want to save energy and time in the future? So write your Instagram captions first. Yes, you heard right.
If you want your Instagram captions to be useful, organize them. Planning your Instagram posts is very important. Besides being a fundamental part of your social media strategy, scheduling Instagram posts and their captions will save you a lot of time.