8 ways to write better social media captions

Scroll. Scroll. Double-tap. Double-tap. Welcome to the world of Social Media. Here you need to grab eyeballs even before the scrolling begins. A good visual, photograph, or design will lead to a double-tap but a compelling caption will lead to interaction – a comment, message or click to the website. 

Sharing pictures on social media is great, but a good caption will provide the context for the post, inspire your followers, add value, drive conversation, and show the brand personality. 

Here are some tips to write a captivating caption & improve your social media marketing strategy.

1. A Perfect Opening

While Facebook posts can be 63,206 characters long, Instagram allows 2200 characters, LinkedIn &  Twitter has a character limit of 700 & 280 characters respectively, however, the opening 40-50 characters play the most important role.

With the decreasing attention span, a good opening line helps to capture the users’ attention.
 
Also, most social media platforms truncate the post copy after a couple of lines, so always have the important part of your copy at the start.

2. Complement the creative

Your captions need to be an extension of your post. There needs to
be a clear link between the image and the caption.

A big mistake lot of social media marketers do is repeating the same message as that on the creative copy using different words. A repetitive copy is as useless as a post with no caption.

Here’s a great example of how a caption can complement the creative copy.

3. Use Emojis 🔥

Regardless of the social media platform and your audience, Emojis are a significant way to give a boost to your captions. Get creative 💥  using the right set of Emojis that go along with your text and connect with your target audience, just be careful not to overdo it.

Here’s a wonderful example of the use of Emojis 

4. Use Relevant Hashtag

Increasing engagement is important, but your posts also need to increase reach and attract new followers. With the use of right and relevant hashtags, you can significantly increase the reach of your post. 

Posts with large numbers of hashtags tend to receive less engagement than posts with a few relevant ones. So pick your winners carefully. 

5. Encourage Conversations

Try to create social media captions that encourage conversation, and entice your audience to respond to your post.

Posing a question is one of the easiest ways to get more comments on your post. The questions don’t have to be complicated, they should be simple and straightforward.

Another great way to involve your audience is by asking them to share their tips, reviews, recommendations, etc. Unless you ask, your users aren’t going to reply to you.

6. Call to Action (CTA)

After doing all the hard work, don’t forget to add to a Call To Action. There are two clear purposes of a CTA –  to tell someone what they should do, and give them the motivation to do so. 

Including a call to action in your caption is a great way to drive traffic to your website, landing pages and blogs. 

But it is a thin line you run, CTA in every post may become jarring, so use CTAs on occasion and when necessary.

7. Make it personal

Use emotions to connect with your audience. Straight forward robot-like captions or a dramatic quote may feel a bit stunted and can cause a disconnect with your audiences.

While you grow your audience don’t forget to add value and connect with them. Without them to spread the word about your brand and products.

8.  Mind the Medium

Captions need to align with the social media medium that you are using. The fun and bubbly caption of Instagram might be too peppy for LinkedIn and the long-form and informative captions of LinkedIn might go unread on Facebook. 

So always craft your captions keeping in your audience and medium in the mind. Customize the length, tonality, and style of your captions as per the platform.

The caption is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the platform and it’s imperative that you use it well to fuel your social media marketing efforts. Don’t post for the sake of posting. Instead, make it worth sharing.

While developing content that helps your social media presence grow takes time, writing a compelling caption can be a great start. If you would like an ally in your social media marketing efforts, reach out to the best digital marketing experts today.