Beyond Pictures: 14 Social Media Caption Tips
Whether it be Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or another platform, social media marketing can be challenging and finding compelling visuals can be tough.
Instead of focusing on business-related images, focus on images that will engage your audience. The reality is that posting about event registrations or making a sales pitch is unlikely to drive meaningful activity. Your audience is human and likely using these platforms on a personal level, so it’s not necessary to engage with them on a solely professional level.
To drive interaction, pay attention to how you’re captioning your posts. Captions shouldn’t be an afterthought; they’re a prime opportunity to engage.
When deciding if a caption “works,” start by asking yourself:
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- How will my audience react to this content?
- Will they find it entertaining?
- How will it make them feel?
A well-written caption is:
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- simple and short (captions cut off in users’ feeds after 3-4 lines of text).
- crafted in your brand voice using a casual tone.
- front-loaded with the most important words.
- informative and encourages viewers to look at the picture more closely.
Ideas, strategies, and tactics for captions:
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- Identify a problem and a solution
- Use a call-to-action to drive interaction
- Include a quote
- Capture one of the five senses
- Behind-the-scenes, instructional, informative, or contest/giveaway captions are usually a slam dunk.
- use #hashtags
- Post a shout-out with an @mention
There are thousands of resources across the internet chock-full of information on strategic captioning. Take 10 minutes to check out those ideas – it will save you hours of pondering about future posts.
