Coming up with good Instagram captions can feel like a stressful, if not impossible, task. There’s a lot of pressure to have a successful social media presence, especially as an influencer or business owner. And sometimes, developing good captions just feels like the icing on the cake when it comes to social media stressors.
But we’re ready to ease a bit of that stress and help you create some of the best captions Instagram has ever seen! Keep reading to find our top five tips for using your captions to get more Instagram likes, and views and achieve Instagram success.
Ready to level up your Instagram captions and use them to reach your social media goals? We thought so. Here are five steps you can start implementing today, and some examples of strong brands that always have great captions!
Whether you’re writing an essay, a novel, a poem, an advertisement, or even a news story, most people are familiar with the rule of thumb…start with a hook! This applies to Instagram captions as well.
No matter what the content of your caption will be, you need to grab people’s attention when they read the first line. So, you should start off with something catchy, surprising, funny, intriguing, inspiring…you get the idea.
If people are interested in the first line of your caption, they’ll be much more likely to read the rest of it. So, start with something good – then tell them what you really want them to hear.
One of the most important analytics, when it comes to Instagram growth, is the engagement rate on your account. If you have high engagement among your followers, you’ll be on your way to grow on the app much sooner.
You can use your captions to your advantage when looking to increase engagement. The best way to do this is by including a call to action, or CTA, in your caption. A CTA is usually located at the end of a caption, but it can go anywhere you want, as long as it encourages your followers to do something.
What does this mean? It’s pretty open-ended, but a call to action will typically invite users to engage with your account in some way. This can mean encouraging them to like a post, leave a comment, check out a post or product, or follow your account (or someone else’s if you are doing a collaboration)…the options are pretty open.
Since you can write anything you want in a caption, make sure to take advantage of that freedom to boost your engagement rates!
As we mentioned, Instagram captions give you the freedom to write virtually anything you want to. Given this freedom, it’s important to pay attention to consistency. No matter what you’re posting, you need to ensure that your brand’s voice sounds the same in your various captions.
You know your branding the best, so it’s up to you to determine what exactly the voice of your brand sounds like. Is it serious? Strong? Light? Funny? Cutesy? Relatable? Deadpan? Sincere?
Take some time to consider how the voice of your branding sounds, and then ensure that this tone shines through in all of the posts that you publish to your Instagram account. This will make your account feel more genuine, which will keep people coming back for more content! (There’s that boost in engagement that we mentioned…)
Using hashtags in your Instagram captions is one of the very best practices that we can recommend. It’s important to go one step further, though, and make sure that you’re using the best hashtags possible.
Your hashtags should be related to your brand as a whole, as well as to the individual post with which you’re including them. They should include keywords that sum up what you’re posting about. Think: If someone were to search for a given keyword and find my post among the search results…what would they have searched for? Part of this can be including a unique hashtag that you’ve created for your brand.
Your hashtags shouldn’t be too specific (no one will find them) or too broad (they’ll get lost in the shuffle). And, you shouldn’t include too few (ineffective) or too many (looks spammy). Finally, you should ensure that each of your posts has a different set of hashtags. If you use the same ones on every single post, they’ll lose their effect.
Like we said before, you’re the one who understands your branding the best. So, you’ll know if it makes sense for you to use emojis in every one of your captions, or if they’re more of a special occasion kind of thing. Either way, we recommend including them at least sometimes – whenever it feels right to you.
Even if your brand has more of a sophisticated tone and you don’t feel that emojis should be an integral part of your branding, you can incorporate them sometimes. For such a brand voice, consider simplistic emojis. Maybe a simple black heart, from time to time?
On the other side of the spectrum, some accounts live for emoji use – and we love to see that, too! If you have a lighthearted brand voice, it can make your content seem relatable and fun if you include emojis more often than not. It’s still a good idea not to overdo it (that can look messy), but keep an eye on what emojis are currently popular, and integrate them into your content whenever it feels right!
So, why are Instagram captions so important, again? It basically comes down to what they have the potential to do for you. All in all, an engaging caption boost engagement – shocker, right? But, let’s take a deeper look at what that actually means.
The more engaging or interesting your caption is, the more inclined users will feel to check out your brand further. If people see a unique caption and want to learn more, the odds are good that they’ll go to your Instagram account and check out more of your content.
Beyond this, users may even take a look at your website or other social media sites, if you have them linked to your Instagram. This is one of the reasons that cross-promotion is so important. If users are impressed with your Insta content and go to your page to learn more, it can be beneficial to you to have links to, or posts about, your other pages handy.
Additionally, engaging posts will help your Instagram account to flourish. The more people are drawn to your captions, the more likely they will be to like and comment on your posts. They will also be more likely to give your account a follow – all because they were drawn in by your clever caption skills!
We just talked about how engaging captions can lead to more activity and followers on your account. But, let’s take that a step further. As users begin to follow you and see that you’re publishing engaging content, they will be more inclined to promote your account among their own followers.
If an Instagram user sees a funny post from you, they might send it to their friends, which can lead to more followers on your account. Or, your followers may see an emotionally moving post from you and repost that to their own account via Instagram Stories. Then, all of their followers will see it…even more traffic and followers for your account. So, you see where we’re going with this. Better captions ultimately lead to more visibility for your Insta.
Additionally, if you consistently post engaging content, your followers are going to feel more connected to your account, which will lead to a boost in brand loyalty. Especially when users see relatable content from your account, they will feel more inclined to follow you or maybe even purchase your products, depending on what kind of brand you are.
As you can see, coming up with engaging Instagram captions can have a significant impact on your brand. Whether you’re running the Instagram account of a company, or you’re an influencer looking to gain even more traction, our recommendation is to ensure that your captions are engaging.
With the five tips we covered here, we feel confident that you can boost your caption game and increase your account’s success in no time. So what are you waiting for? Go start your list of caption ideas!