A good Instagram caption adds meaning, entertains your audience, shows your brand's personality, and drives people to take action.
To help you get started creating Instagram captions that are as great as your content, I've put together this guide with all my top tips, real examples, and best tools.
A good Instagram caption adds meaning, entertains your audience, shows your brand’s personality, and drives people to take action.
The main guidelines for Instagram captions are that they must be up to 2,200 characters in length and can't have more than 30 hashtags.
Now let's get to the actual tips.
If you haven’t identified your target audience as part of a broader social media marketing strategy, I recommend building audience personas. These archetypes outline basic details about your target customers, their goals, and their pain points.
Your persona should include:
For Instagram, it's a must to include the type of content they like to consume and the Instagram accounts they follow.
With this research completed, you’ll know whom you're speaking to, and it'll be easier to evaluate:
site:instagram.com -inurl:/p your_niche_or_keywoard
I additionally recommend you check whom those accounts are following, or whom Instagram shows in their "Suggested for You" section. Which you can find by pressing the dropdown button—located to the right of the follow button.
Understanding how to communicate with your target audience is essential to any brand.
So, before you start jotting down your next caption, you should identify your brand voice.
To shape your voice, you can answer questions that will inform what's fitting for your brand:
Answering those questions will help you find the right tone and write engaging captions.
Caption limits are currently maximum of 2,200 characters in length and max 30 hashtags. Yet what's more important is that captions are cut off in users’ feeds after a few lines of text, and only 125 characters will show up.
But that doesn't mean you should keep your caption super short so users can see 100% of it without having to click "more." Instead, you need to convey your key point or call to action right away. Put any @mentions and hashtags at the end.
Also, leading with the most important words is just good writing. Hook the reader in and give them a reason to tap “more.”
A call to action, or CTA for short, can make people: engage, tag their friends, share your post, pose a question, follow your page or your link in bio.
1. Something to keep in mind when writing a call to action is that action words like “start,” “stop,” “build,” “join,” “learn,” and “discover” are more efficient at influencing your followers to do something than passive nouns and adjectives.
2. Consider turning your call to action into a question as a way to encourage your followers to comment/take action!
For example, instead of boring people by telling them to comment on which outfit they like more. I asked them a voting-type question so they would feel inclined to give their opinion. That worked great, as you see, bringing in 70+ comments.
BONUS TIP 1: Make your post's comments explode with a viral caption. If you're out of ideas—ask your followers to caption your post, and let the crowd do the speaking for you! You'll be amazed at how well this works in any niche.
3. Add more than 1 call to action to your caption to increase your engagement and conversion rate. Just make sure it makes sense. Yet, I don't recommend using more than 4, since it might look like spam.
4. Test multiple CTAs to find out which ones work better for your audience.
BONUS TIP 2: Use stories to promote or boost your CTA.
Use emojis to tell a story, explain what's happening, replace words to shorten sentences, or point to an action.
You can use a “👉” or “👀” emoji next to “link in bio”, so it’s super obvious to those who are reading your caption that you want them to click the link in your bio!
I've been testing hashtag strategies since 2016, and there are numerous ways to get them right. Now I'll share one of the easiest growth hacks that don't get talked about a lot, but takes no time whatsoever, and has been working for my clients and me since the beginning of my Instagram marketing days:
1) Go into your Explorer feed
2) Find a viral post that is close to your content
3) Copy the hashtags and try them out!
Just don't forget, your post needs to be viral since the hashtags can't do their magic without highly consumable content.
Post didn't go viral in 36 hours? Test another set from another post!
If you want to get better results try reusing hashtags from accounts with smaller and similar follower counts.
I also recommend adding hashtags as a comment for a cleaner look and only using ones in your caption that add context to your post.
Instagram's algorithm ranks your content by how much engagement it receives in a period of time. If you post a photo and it gets 2x the regular amount of likes in the first hour, Instagram will boost your post out to a lot more people.
It will show up first in people’s feeds, make it to the explore page, and maybe even appear in the top posts on hashtags and location searches.
However, every single time you edit Instagram posts, the algorithm resets your engagement ranking! Making you start all over again. All those people that Instagram was planning on showing it to now won't see it.
This can totally destroy your engagement rate, no matter how amazing the post might be.
Double-check your caption, tags, location, and hashtags before you hit upload to avoid this amateur error!
Many Instagrammers have tried and tested this theory. In fact, when I stopped doing it, my engagement increased dramatically!
A little typo isn’t worth losing all your hard-earned work.
If you have made a colossal mistake, delete the whole post and re-upload the next day for the best results.
Now that you know how to write compelling captions let's look at some of the most effective caption types and how successful brands use them to engage their audience.
Use the poll caption to boost your comments by making commenting for your followers fun and simple!
People get to weigh in their opinion and can do so real quick with only a few words. Want more comments? Enter the answers as a selection in your caption, and now they don't even have to think. Just choose a side.
That is why poll captions work so well for increasing engagement and collecting audience data.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by 𝘿𝙧𝙞𝙞𝙥 𝘾𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 ⚡️ (@driipcollection)
Gymshark pairs step-by-step exercise videos with workout instructions in the caption itself. Simple + useful = a great caption.
The link-in-bio CTA caption encourages followers to click the link in your bio. Hit emotions, offer something relevant and useful, and you got yourself a link click.
Nike uses it to grow their brand recognition by getting people to read their sports news or participate in their community events.
Instagram is a good platform choice for behind-the-scenes content. That's why ISO 1200 magazine often writes about models they work with in their captions.
If your content is attention-grabbing and speaks for itself, a short caption is best. You can let the content do most of the talking.
If your post needs context, then, by all means, take advantage of Instagram’s generous character count.
Supreme tells a story about an artist they were working with, and at the end, they use a CTA directing people to their new project. A great example of a lengthy caption put to good use.
There are only a few things more tempting on Instagram than the idea of free stuff. If you're holding a giveaway, promote it in the caption.
It should include an explanation on how to enter and what to do, and what sort of stuff you might get. Edward and Sons is an excellent example of putting it to use:
Try using quotes, not the cliché ones, but those that are specific to the post.
Marvel gives an excellent example of quoting your past work by citing one of their fan-favorite line from the Avengers movie:
Want to drive engagement? Ask for it by inviting people to tag their friends. Melano Jewelry has a great example of how to do it:
Use @mentions to declare collaborations and hype up your audience.
Channel does this all the time when promoting to increase their product attraction and decrease buyer doubt since it works great as social proof.
People often forget that if you havemultiple social media channels, chances are the same audience doesn't follow you onall of them. And this is where you can benefit by merging their audiences with cross-promo!
Hashtastic is the most powerful and robust hashtag scanner out there, packed with features that will take your Instagram account to the next level.
From multiple hashtag search engines to the account scanner, viral media finder, hashtag performance analytics, campaigns, hashtag sets, hashtag groups, and many more features... Whatever your needs may be, Hashtastic has you covered.
Named for Ernest Hemingway, the desktop tool promises to make your writing “bold and clear.”It analyzes text and, with color-coded highlights, points out where your writing has become sloppy or indulgent. It allows you toeasily cut down run-on sentences and swap out difficult words for simpler alternatives.
Grammarly catches errors that most traditional spell checkers miss—everything from inconsistent use of tense to missing commas. This tool even offers synonym suggestions to help add variety to your writing.
Now that you got real examples and great tools to write your own effective Instagram captions. Get to posting!
