The Ultimate Guide To Writing A Good Instagram Caption

We all know how the saying goes – “a picture is worth 1,000 words.” This saying is especially applicable to Instagram, as the whole concept behind the app is to be as visually stimulating as possible. When carried out successfully, an account is able to attract the appropriate audience, hold their interest, and increase brand exposure. At the end of the day, the name of the game is to promote your brand as much as possible and what better way to do that than through a photo. Nonetheless, just like all good superheroes need a kick-ass sidekick, all good photos need a kick-ass caption. You’d actually be surprised at how the use of a great Instagram caption can turn your content from good to fire. So how do you go about writing a good Instagram caption?

Creating the perfect Instagram caption for a photo can be extremely difficult, especially when we are all pressured to push out so much content on the reg. Yes, good content will surely draw in the initial attention, but you want to utilize the caption feature to keep interest going, increase engagement and make social connections. Making these social connections will allow you to build your brand and be a part of the community to which your brand belongs.

Furthermore, these connections will create more business for your brand and your numbers across the board will begin to rise. After all, Instagram does reward accounts with good engagement. Why you ask? The more engagement and traffic your account organically receives, the more lnstagram will be alerted that your profile is generating important content. The app will then further promote your page. Ever wonder how accounts end up on the explore page? Engagement! An abundance of likes, comments, and shares on a post signals Instagram to promote your post to more and more users within your target audience. 

Ultimately, if you want to find success on Instagram and blossom your business to reach its fullest potential, you can’t get lazy with your Instagram captions – or anything else for that matter. There are several things you should focus on when it comes down to writing out your caption – it should be brief, include your brand’s personality, provide context for your content and motivate your followers to take action. How? Well, we’ve created the following guideline so that you can turn your Instagram captions from good to great!

Keep it brief.

What I mean here is really make sure your first couple of lines stand out. Overall, a brief caption is what works best, but successful captions truly do come in all shapes and sizes. As long as it’s compelling and pulling in the interest of your viewers, then you’re on the right track! There is so much content being shoved into everyone’s faces every day, so you’ll always want to make sure the first portion of your Instagram caption is as engaging as possible as this is what will draw your viewers to read more.

Ok, so you’re really set on the idea of fitting as much as you can into one caption – that’s fine too! If you’re going to write out a longer caption, start with an intro at the top and make sure there’s some sort of divide to separate the main idea from the rest of the body. This can be done with the use of a symbol, a few spaces or even some emojis. The people that want to continue reading will do so, and for those whose attention spans are little to none (moi), they’ll need to get the gist within your first few sentences.  

Additionally, an Instagram caption is automatically shortened to improve the flow of the viewer’s feed, so you’ll want your first couple of lines to be as compelling as possible as that’s what people will initially see when they’re scrolling through their feeds.

Show personality.

What is your brands overall personality? Is it sassy and chic? Or maybe funny and lighthearted? Whatever it is, make sure you carry your voice into the captions! This is where things can get a bit difficult since a lot of the time people tend to just write their captions on the go. Don’t resort to the classic robot voice and caption your photo with three emojis you think are relevant, because that’s just boring and no one will want to interact with you. Or if they do, they’ll most likely comment back with emojis and your account will begin to look very spammy, which is definitely not the goal.

If you’re experiencing this ever so common writer’s block when it comes to captioning your work, and really juggling between what the personality of your captions should be, just take a second to look at your photo and jot down the first thing that comes to mind. Remember, the majority of viewers react to a photo in a similar manner. Take a step back and look at the photo as a viewer. This will help you to make your captions more captivating and relatable since you’ll be taking on the perspective of the viewer. After all, relatable posts perform the best.

That being said, you’ll want to carry your brand’s voice consistently throughout your feed, so once you find your idea, add your own twist to it. If you want to be sassy, be sassy! If you want your captions to be informative, get to typing! Regardless, just decide what kind of personality you’d like to showcase throughout your Instagram captions and test the waters!

Use a C-T-A!

This is one of the greatest ways to get your followers to engage with your content! It’s also pretty straightforward, making it an overall easy tactic to boost engagement and make your captions that much more interesting. Call-to-actions can be anything from asking viewers to answer a question to tagging a friend or checking out a new product. The purpose is to get the viewer to perform a desired action. In addition to driving traffic to your page, this technique will naturally increase the comments on your post and bring in some new viewers, especially if people are tagging friends or hashtags. You’d be surprised at how far a simple call-to-action can go in regards to boosting your engagement!

Try to focus on using words that provoke action and avoid speaking in a subdued tone. Depending upon what you’d ultimately like the viewer to do, use strong vocabulary to really persuade viewers to follow through. You can even use emojis to bring attention to your call-to-action. Make it stand out!

This technique does not need to be a part of every caption in your gallery. However, when you do sprinkle in some call-to-actions here and there, make sure to incorporate it into the beginning of your caption. As mentioned prior, Instagram shortens your captions to improve viewer experience and you won’t want people to overlook your awesome call-to-action.

Use emojis!

Think of emojis as the seasoning to your dish. Everything tastes better with a little salt and pepper! With hundreds to choose from, there is bound to be at least one emoji that is relevant to your post. Plus, adding an emoji to your writing makes the Instagram caption more inviting and playful! It’s a great way to incorporate some personality into your caption, as mentioned earlier, and have fun while doing it!

Use mentions and hashtags.

Don’t forget that Instagram is a SOCIAL app. It wants you to interact with your community and share some love! An easy way to do so is to include Instagram handles within your captions. This is a really great way to promote one another and connect. Maybe you’re already tagging accounts in your photo, but try to incorporate their handle into your caption as well. For example, if you run a clothing line, you’ll want to include the model’s handle in your caption. Or if you use user-generated content, always give the creator credit within the caption.

Oh, and we can’t leave out the hashtags! Instagram wouldn’t be Instagram without the hashtags! Try getting creative here and make up some of your own. Add in hashtags throughout your caption as this will help with your profile’s search-ability and highlight keywords throughout your text, bringing extra attention to the theme of your post. Be careful not to go overboard with it though. Adding too many hashtags can make your caption look spammy, and again, we do not want that!

Definitely do some research here to see which hashtags are most relevant to your brand and have the most engaging community behind them. Then, include these hashtags at the end of your caption or in a separate comment.

Learn more: The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Hashtags

Overall, the best way to make sure you’re able to implement these tactics successfully into your caption strategy would be to plan everything in advance. Grab a cup of coffee, tea or whatever energizes your mind, and spend a day cranking out those captions for the month!  You really don’t want to save writing out Instagram captions until the last minute, unless you work extremely well under pressure – then you do you! For the rest of us, creative moods come and go, so luckily there are a couple of apps that are really useful for scheduling posts and organizing your captions. A couple of our favorites are Later and Plann.  

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