Posted by Even with years of experience, we sometimes find it difficult to put words together as Instagram captions.
Some brands are doing it flawlessly and others are learning from what the social space has to offer.
Your Instagram captions may not be perfect and that is okay. You don’t have to be hard on yourself and not all your captions should be a masterpiece because we’re only humans.
Instagram as a platform has always focused on making connections, consistency, and engagement.
Not perfection.
It’s better to publish our ideas of imperfect captions and posts than not post at all.
So, if you’re not too inspired, don’t stress out. It’s okay to go ahead and publish the “not so perfect” captions too.
Let’s look at some things to keep in mind while writing Instagram captions that are catchy and engaging?
1. Your first sentence should steal the show
While scrolling, if your post shows up on the feed, it’s the first sentence that is going to help a viewer decide to double-tap the post or not.
More so, the chances of a viewer heading over to your profile and engaging with your previous content is higher if the caption on your posts is eye-catching.
Example: Crowdfire
The first sentence starts with “Hey, listen.”
This is one of the ways to ensure you make more thumbs stop and then get them to continue reading.
It’s also important to ensure you have eyes glued. In the post below you’ll see a lot of details.
But, the caption here focuses on first getting the attention, then having your audience glued with the following questions that act as a hook –
-Is your ideal customer smiling today? Or perhaps something ticked them off?
-Can you really tell what they are feeling about you?
-Are you tuned in to them? If not, we’ve got a super simple solution for you.
And then, all other details to follow as seen in this post below.
2. Humanize captions as much as possible
When you write captions for your Instagram posts, ensure the copy has a personality. This is a great way for you to build connections with your followers.
Also, your followers will know your brand as well as the fact that there is a human behind it.
Some things to work on are a persona, tone of voice, emojis, and the style that they’d be able to relate to.
When these things are on point, your follower will also be able to share, repost and engage with your brand by liking and commenting on your content.
Example: Wendy’s
Wendy’s is a fast-food chain that is known for its social media manager first and then its burgers.
The brand is a queen of engagement and never fails to ace any topicals, roasts, or trolls, and has its Instagram captions always on point!
Here’s one of their posts being the perfect example of humor as well as human touch you should give your captions to drive engagement and make your viewers connect with the human behind the Instagram account.
3. Call to Action
The message, announcement, or anchor you’d like to add should be crisp and within the first two lines.
The content you publish should have a purpose and intention.
Here’s the caption that should be the answer to the question “What do you want your followers to do?”
Subscribe to a specific plan?
Visit your website?
Participate in a giveaway?
Share the post with their friends?
A few CTA’s you can include in your posts are —
1. Link in the bio
2. Use a specific Hashtag
3. Like and comment on the post
4. Tag your friends in the comment section
5. Repost stories
Example: Paradyes
Paradyes is a semi-permanent hair color brand. They launch the color of the month based on their consumer demand.
This month, they encouraged their users to comment as to what they’d like the color of the month to be?
Based on the responses, they shared another post with a caption that had a few instructions for what their followers should do to ensure they launch Blush pink as the color of the month for July!
To encourage more from their audience, they also reminded their users through the caption in their next post that read :
And finally launched it and announced it through this Reel –
4. Ensure your captions are relatable
You’d know your audience the best as a human behind the Instagram account. In fact, Instagram analytics takes you through metrics and numbers that help you understand the characteristics of humans that visit, view, and engage with your accounts.
Once you know your audience well, you can begin brainstorming and creating a bank of thoughts, ideas, and captions for your Instagram account.
You can also work on evaluating what does well for your Instagram account. Then, improvise and publish content that is engaging for you or your brand.
Let’s look at how this page shares poems that are super relatable to their audience
Example: The Alipore Post
5. Keep a tab on the length
Keeping it short is the best way to make that thumb stop. It is important to ensure the first 125 characters have announcements or messages at the very beginning of your caption.
If it is longer than 125 characters, they would have to tap the ‘more’ option to read the whole post.
Another way to leverage the 125 characters is to divide your caption into paragraphs. to improve readability.
You can also add a very catchy line at the beginning to ensure it is to be continued to be read-only when the user taps the more option.
Example: Le15
Le15 is a patisserie based out of Mumbai, India, that is owned by Pooja Dhingra.
Their most recent launch at Le15 is a new flavor of hot chocolate and here’s how Pooja seamlessly aced engagement through a teaser and a caption that was less than 200 characters.
6. Hashtags are super important
Love them or hate them, you can’t ignore them.
That’s hashtags for you.
From enabling your account to be found on Instagram to making your content visible to the right set of people, to even helping you gain those extra likes on your post — hashtags are the most powerful way of growing on Instagram.
They help you show up on the explore page and also reach a wider audience on the platform.
So how do hashtags work?
Every time you create a post on Instagram and add a caption along with some hashtags to it, the post becomes searchable and discoverable by other users.
This helps a lot of people to discover your content, optimizes the reach of your post, and in turn helps you gain more engagement on your Instagram account.
For example, if you’re a food blogger and you hashtag your post with #whatsonmyplate, #foodphotography, #foodblogger, or any food-related hashtag, your post gets added to the pool of posts that carry the same hashtag.
Example: Propshop24
PropShop24 is a gift shop that offers a wide range of products for your Home, Office, Gadgets, Fashion, and lots more.
Their presence on Instagram is relevant and each of their captions has hashtags relevant to the category of products they post about.
Wrapping up!
Through these 6 tips and brand examples, you would be able to ensure you work on creating a bank of engaging captions that will help your brand ace the social space.
That’s it, folks! 🙌
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