One of the best ways you can engage your audience is through social media. Whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or other platforms, captions are a great way to share what's happening in your life and show off your personality in the process.
It's not always easy to find the perfect word, but it is worth the effort for a good caption that will get more likes and shares on social media. This is why it's important to make sure you're using the right words in them that will grab their attention and keep them scrolling through your content.
Here are some tips for writing captions that will not only keep people interested but also help them draw connections to their own lives.
Keep The Important Information First
Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are often optimized for a mobile viewing experience. This means that only the first 125 characters of a caption are what determines whether a visitor will continue to read your caption. To see the rest of the caption, the user has to click more.
Remember, you’re competing for user attention with every other blog that they follow, whether it is branded or not. You want to catch their interest quickly before they scroll past to look at a more interesting post. Make those first characters count, and entice the reader to learn more or engage with the post.
Tell A Story About Your Brand
The social media market is expanding quickly and with it, social media captions are constantly evolving to keep up. Knowing what’s hot or not can help you create social content that drives engagement and makes your company look good!
You can build authenticity with your social media captions by telling a story about your brand that connects with readers. This might be anything from a brief history of the company or product to a personal story about an employee. A caption doesn’t need to be long to tell a story!
Consider The Structure Of Your Captions
You already know that a user has to click more to see a caption longer than 125 characters, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid long captions. Since Instagram allows up to 2,200 characters in a caption, and Facebook allows 63,206 characters, you could use more words to enrich the content and ensure that the reader will click more to see the longer caption.
When constructing a longer caption, keep the format in mind. A huge block of text is difficult to read, especially on mobile where the print is smaller. Break the text up, and add bullet points if necessary. The more easily the text and post can be digested, the more likely the user is to view more of your branded content.
Ask Questions To Encourage Engagement
Keeping your reader engaged is crucial, even when it comes to social media posts! Increasing engagement is the main way to increase reach on Instagram. However, just having interesting content isn’t always enough. You have to encourage users to actively engage with your posts instead of just skimming them.
One way to encourage engagement is to ask the user a question in your caption. Questions give users something direct to respond to, so they are engaging with an answer rather than having to come up with a comment. Your questions need to be relevant to your brand, random questions will not generate meaningful engagement or help your brand.
Use Emojis To Show Your Personality
Emojis are growing increasingly more popular amongst social media. By now, they are common across almost all social media platforms, with over 50% of Instagram accounts using emojis in their posts. Including emojis in your Instagram captions is a great way to grab the reader's interest as well as personalize your brand.
Studies have shown that social media posts with emojis actually have higher rates of engagement than posts without emojis. Emojis can also be used to break up long blocks of text, and they add extra personality to your posts.
Include Relevant Hashtags
In addition to increasing engagements, your posts also need to increase reach and attract new followers. Hashtags are a great way to achieve this. Posts with at least one hashtag receive more likes and comments than posts without any hashtags. This is due to the fact that social media users often follow specific hashtags, allowing you to reach users who follow the hashtag, as well as users who follow your social media page.
However, this doesn’t mean you should just use the most popular hashtags in your posts to reach as many people as possible. In fact, posts with large numbers of hashtags tend to receive less engagement than posts with a few relevant ones. Users can also hide posts they don’t want to see for a particular hashtag, and too many flags will likely decrease how often your posts show up in user feeds.
Use @ Mentions To Increase Reach
You have probably heard of social media influencers. Social media influencers have huge followings and actively impact the purchase decisions of their followers. Social media allows you to connect yourself to these influencers and reach their followers as well as your own. When you use the @ mention function to tag someone on social media, they receive a notification.
If they comment on the post or share it with their following, the post will appear in their followers’ feeds. In the case of an Instagram influencer, your post may be showing up in the feeds of thousands of people you wouldn’t have otherwise reached. It is no surprise that an influencer isn’t likely to engage with a random post, but if you tag them in it, it is a great way to increase your reach.
Always Include A Call To Action
Last but not least, is the importance of a call to action. If you really want to entice your user to take action, you should explicitly tell them to do so. A call to action directs users on what they should do after they finish reading your post.
The goal of your call to action is to encourage users to engage with your brand, either on or off the social media platform. Where is the best place for a call to action on your social media posts? That’s right, your social media caption. There are many call-to-action items that will work, but here are some examples:
- ‘Tag us in your photos’
- ‘Like if you agree’
- ‘Comment with your favorite…’
- ‘Visit (link to your website) to order today
