What's on your mind? You might have seen Instagram asking you when writing a new post. If you literally write whatever comes to your mind, for sure, you will never grow on Instagram. You need to know the Art of the Caption and how to write Instagram posts that get you followers.
Writing a caption is not just about typing anything in your post's description. It's a skill for which content writers and copywriters are paid. In this blog post, we will help you learn that art or skill, so you can write compelling Instagram captions that not only encourage people to read but also help you grow followers.
What is Art of Caption?
Why do you need to learn the Art of Caption?
Instagram is a media-dominant social media that prioritizes photos and videos to keep its user base engaged. That means, very few people read your captions. That's why you need to learn the Art of caption. It explains the step-by-step strategic process of writing a highly engaging caption that leads them to follow your Instagram.
Benefits of Writing an Effective Caption:
- Make your post indexable for Instagram search
- Allow increasing the reach with hashtags
- Collaboration opportunity by tagging accounts
- Increasing follower visits by tagging yourself.
- It allows you to tell a longer story with ease.
The Magical Instagram Caption Structure
The first step to write a well-performing caption on Instagram is to understand the right structure of a caption. A well-structured content will encourage your audience, regardless of whether it's a reel or a post.
Based on Instagram guidelines, a caption can be 2200 characters long, but after 125 characters, it will truncate your caption with a small "more" text. The user has to tap on "more" text to read the full caption. What this means is that your starting 125 characters is a win-or-lose game.
How to structure your Instagram caption
Here's the right way to mix the ingredients in your Instagram caption to make a follower magnet:
Hook
Always begin your Instagram caption with a hook. A hook is a catchy, prompting phrase that ignites curiosity in your audience's mind. It can be shocking, funny, questions, facts, etc. Here are some good examples for a hook :
- 75% women think that men...
- A shocking fact revealed says that....
- Experts say that the share price will...
- The best gifts for your loved one under $1 are…
- Try this on your wife to seduce her 😁....
- Love gifts she will never forget❤️....
Bonus tip: Include emoji in the first 125 characters; it instantly catches readers' attention.
The story
Once they tap the more text to read your complete description. It's time to tell the story and say what you want them to hear. There's no certain way to tell your story, but there are some best practices that will make your story interesting, and they will read it completely.
First point to remember is that Instagram doesn't allow text formatting features. This means you can NOT make text bold, italic, or strikethrough, and you can NOT use bullet points. But there are some workarounds for this.
Best Practices to make your caption interesting
- Never go beyond 3 lines of a paragraph; if you want to write more, add line breaks.
- People love to read bullet points; even though Instagram doesn't allow bullet points, you can use circle and symbol emojis to make them appear like bullet points.
- You can use third-party tools like Editpad, igfonts, and many other custom Unicode online font generators to make your caption stand out.
- Inline hashtags are a much better way to use hashtags than putting them last.
The Hashtags
Hashtags are special keywords that help boost the reach of your account. It should be included in your caption if your Instagram account is new. You can find the list of trending Instagram hashtags for all kinds of niches in our blog posts.
The CTA
Instagram doesn't allow links, but you can tag other Instagram accounts using the '@' symbol followed by their username. This comes in handy to increase profile visits on your account. You can add both In-line tags and tags at last based on your convenience.
If you prefer tags at last, then add multiple copies of your tag, one below the other. This will make it easier for users to tap on it. If you are going with inline tags, then using them once is fine.
Short Caption Vs Long Caption
Even though Instagram allows 22000 characters to write a caption, it's not mandatory to exhaust the limit. You can write a shorter caption when you have already explained a lot in your Post through images or video. Choose a longer caption if you want to split your content 20% via photo or video and 80% via caption.
Making your caption searchable
Approximately 6.5 billion searches are done on Instagram every day. This is a golden opportunity to grow your followers. For this to happen, you need to write a caption that includes your niche-related keywords. Including trending keywords is another trick to make your account come to the top of the feed.
You can use sites like Google Trends or KeywordTool to find out trending topics and related keywords. Later on, you can write your caption, including all highly searchable keywords, so it will increase the chance of your posts coming to the search feed.
Building Credibility
If your Instagram caption is just a fairy tale without any facts and figures, then people are going to ignore it. Building credibility involves researching the topic you are writing about. Try to include numbers, facts, and sources to increase the caption's credibility
It's not necessary to write a long caption, but it's very important to include facts or numbers that support your words. Even if you write 2 2-line captions, make it worth a paragraph, including all details that your audience needs to know.
Choose your tone
Every niche has a different tone for writing a caption. It can be funny, professional, casual, personal, sensitive, and conversational. Depending on the type of content and your niche, you need to adjust your tone, vocabulary, grammar, and writing style.
For example, if you have a meme account or you post funny reels, then you can go easy on grammar, use jargon, and phrases to make your caption funny. But, if your Instagram account niche is finance, then you can't make grammatical errors; you need to choose your vocabulary carefully and must use abbreviations to make it professional.
Give a personal touch
We are in a generation of AI Tools, a 22000-character caption can be generated in microseconds, but it lacks your personal touch. Adding a human touch or your personal touch to the caption is really necessary. It connects readers to the story very easily compared to the ChatGPT prompt.
A personal touch can be anything, like a tagline, a sarcastic tone, using a fixed set of emojis, or mixing different languages together. It's totally up to you what you will choose, but having a personal tone makes it easier for people to recognize you as you.
Conclusion
Writing an Instagram caption is an Art that involves both mind and heart. It will not only help you write a post description, but you can also write the caption for your photos, script for your reel, or your Instagram Bio. Learning this art will be a boon for your Instagram journey, and we will be your companion, helping you with new articles every day.