Instagram is all about visuals. Top-quality photos, entertaining reels, and engaging stories! We both know it's hard work producing top-quality content, from the millions of photos shot to narrowing it down to those perfect few, to editing, then the caption…When posting, you subconsciously have three goals;
Gain followers
Get engagement
Get people interested in your brand
Get the to BUY something (this one may not be so subconscious).
After hours spent editing, a good caption can still take people hours to figure out.
The caption is meant to give a voice to your visuals. It explains the photo, tells a small story to engage people, then tells them to take action.
Here is how to build great Instagram captions for your business.
Plan Your Content in Advance!
I know you've heard it before, but you're going to hear it again. Plan your posts in advance. This gives you the opportunity to write out your caption once and make as many changes as you want up until the date to post it! You may even write down a couple of different captions and choose the one you like most the day of.
Instagram values your content based on how much engagement it receives. So make sure your captions lock your reader in, aren't too long that they lose interest, and at a bare minimum like worthy.
Order Matters
Instagram offers the ability to write a 2,200 character caption. But your caption cuts off in a user's feed in three to four lines of text.
However, that does not mean to keep your captions short just so users see all four lines of text; simply just load the most important or captivating text first so that people will read more.
Business Principals Still Matter
The same old business principles still matter. I mean that your caption is still a sales pitch where you have to call your customers to action. So always include a call to action.
Ask for Engagement
A question, an individual experience, what inspires them, link in bio, like, share, comment, tag, whatever your call to action is, tell the people what you want them to do and how you want them to interact with your brand.
Limit Your Hashtags
While you're still under 1K followers, use all 30 of your hashtags. The reason being, Instagram is still trying to figure out your niche to know how to promote your content. Once you have reached 1K followers, it is no longer needed to use all those hashtags. Instead, try to bring it down to 5 very high-performing and relevant hashtags to your niche.
Be a Human
Your brand's tone matters. If you were to post the same post on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, do you think they would all have the same tone? No. Of course not. Instagram is light-hearted and playful, whereas, on Facebook, you can get away with being a little more political about your brand. LinkedIn, you would certainly jazz up your post with more professional business lingo.
Use Emojis
In a world where everyone is scrolling, emojis stop people in their tracks and help demonstrate your tone. In addition, they are eye-catching and increase the amount of traffic driven to your post. Even more serious brands use them for that reason.
Keep It Brief
No one logs onto Instagram to say, "I'm just going to take the time and read every long caption today." NO. People are on Instagram for entertainment. No one wants to read your life story. So keep it brief and to the point.
All in all, don't overanalyze it. Just keep in mind three things:
Entertain
Don't be a robot
Have a call to action
You will start to be able to see what is working and what isn't.
Happy posting!
~ Aethra & Brontide Consulting