It is now impossible for business owners and marketers to ignore the reach of Instagram as an effective customer engagement platform. As of 2021, this fast-growing social networking platform reports more than a billion active users monthly, and the number is growing day by day. You may already be posting catchy photos and videos on your Instagram business feeds and IGTV. Still, if you are not giving proper attention to your text copy and Instagram captions, you may be losing out on some great opportunities.
Instagram captions serve the purpose of increasing your likes, website traffic, and the number of followers by ultimately contributing towards your sales. Instagram is a visual platform, and a strong image out there can get your users to slow down their scroll and lock on your post. But only a well-thought-out caption will be able to do any heavy lifting in terms of marketing and sales.
How to make a good caption for Instagram?
Instagram captions can surely help evaluate your brand’s social media success and improve your posts at the bottom line. With some recent updates on the algorithm, the posts on Instagram are likely to be seen based on your engagement rates with the viewers. This algorithm’s metrics include what you are receiving user comments on a post and whether you also engage with these comments. These changes mean that simply having a bigger follower base may no longer guarantee your post to be seen by many people. Instagram also explains how these algorithms work as what shows first on your feeds will determine by what post or account you engage with the most to decide your views.
It means that what shows up on top of an Instagram user channel may be based on the user activities for the beginners. So, business marketers need to entice the users to engage with the post you put, whether it is hovering on it for a few seconds or commenting, liking, or sharing it. To add value to your Instagram post, let us discuss some tips for writing engaging captions.
Write Instagram captions
Before exploring caption writing, you need to go back to your primary goals as running some awareness campaigns to increase your visibility and brand awareness.-promoting sales with a new product launch or a collection launch. You should also encourage user-generated content using branded Instagram hashtags for more free likes for IG.
Make the most out of the first sentence on your caption
Instagram tends to shorten your captions after a few lines. So, it is important to include the details in the very beginning itself. The first sentence will be seen on the users’ feed to ensure that it is compelling or like asking a question. Do not put your call to action towards the end.
Ask a question or include a call to action
All your posts should have an intention or a purpose to serve. Try to lead each one with its specific goal and let this goal dictate the call to action. Check out what you want your followers to do as
- Visiting your website?
- Shop for a particular product?
- Share your post with their followers?
- Enter into a contest?
- Answer a quick query?
- Snapping their photos and sharing them with a specific branded hashtag?
Whatever your goal, the key to success is to encourage more engagement to create a sense of dialogue and conversations. It is also a great way to work around the new Instagram algorithm, which takes the engagement rate as a metric to serve your posts. Better engagement will also increase the likelihood of your post appearing more on the user feeds as a recommended account to follow.
Add value
You should try to offer tips and tricks or information to educate the users and add value to your Instagram posts.For example, adding more value within the Instagram captions will help users make the post shared and commented the most.
Write human captions
You may have felt it yourself that many Instagram captions are seemingly mechanical as written by a robot. However, authenticity matters a lot while communicating over social channels like Instagram. When it comes to captions or content, try to put your real self and do the writing as you speak directly to someone. You can try to be intentional and strategic, but you should also reflect a human tone to be natural and act as a friend to the reader.
Use story-telling method
It is not advisable to be neutral while writing Instagram captions. Try to spice up your captions and add your personality to them. For example, you may add a couple of sensory phrases or anecdotes to paint the picture. Try to describe the taste, touch, sight, sound, feel, emotions, etc., inhuman ways. Try to be specific but never be so neutral.
Consider the length of the text
As with any other social media marketing strategies, your Instagram copy is also about ensuring quality over quantity. Try to make it short and catchy than featuring longer and more in-depth text. When it comes to Instagram caption writing, there is no right or wrong in terms of length, but if the post is too long, you may easily lose the users’ interest.
Hashtags
Along with all these, you must also take care of Instagram hashtags which are the key to make your post searchable. On Instagram, hashtags function like keywords as on the search engines and social platforms. As a result, hashtags have very strong searching and tracking capabilities. You notice the grouping of hashtags by brands at the end of the caption or more. Some tend to add several lines of text with periods to set apart the highest tags, which may take them away from the description space. The best approach is to sprinkle some hashtags within the caption itself by giving it the right dimension.
While writing captions and Instagram text, you need to make sure that you are not overdoing things. Rightly spicing up your sales copy with bits of all this advice in a balanced manner is the right approach to ensure success.
