Tips For Writing Engaging Captions

For captions as strong as your brand imagery, follow these tips...

© Sandra Semburg via Vogue Paris

Do your Instagram captions provide context, maintain your brand voice, and inspire your followers to take action? Follow our advice to see how you can best engage your audience, beat the algorithm and strengthen your brand's Instagram presence.

Include a call to action or ask a question

Whether you want to encourage comments, generate sales or promote website visits, be sure to include a variety of calls to action in your captions. Remember to switch between objectives to avoid caption fatigue. Posing questions in your copy will not only provide reliable consumer feedback but its also a great algorithm-beating tactic too (ensuring your content is more likely to appear in users' feeds).

Add value to captions

Styling tips, product information and care advice are easy ways to add value to your Instagram captions and increase the likelihood of them being saved by your followers.

Be authentic and add personality

Ensure that your tone of voice is consistent with your website, blog and email marketing campaigns to provide your followers with a cohesive brand experience. Aim to strike the balance between commercial and personal; people like to see the human side of brands on social media and authenticity is key. Don't be afraid to add emojis and be playful from time to time. You are a human and not a robot, after all!

Consider caption length

Captions can be up to 2,200 characters in length, but we'd recommend keeping them short and sweet. When captions are longer than three lines, your followers will need to tap 'more' to continue reading, creating more of an obstacle. Captions should be concise, add context and aim for around 125 characters. Remember to add key points and calls to action sooner rather than later and add any @mentions and hashtags at the end.

Use Hashtags

Use hashtags wisely! They're a great way to boost discoverability and reach accounts outside of your current sphere of followers, but use too many and you run the risk of making your content look like spam. You can use up to 30 hashtags per post but a mixture of 3-6 high and low-density options are sufficient. Hashtags can either be shared in the caption or added in a comment below your post. Make sure to keep things fresh and constantly work to switch up your hashtag strategy.

Words by Daniel Flay