Social media was originally used by people to connect or establish a network with their old friends. It also served as a communication tool between people or a group of people. Nowadays, social media is more than just a sharing platform. It has become a way to raise awareness for a business or a cause.
Social media is a good platform for businesses not only because it increases awareness but also because it connects you with customers which in turn boosts leads and sales. It’s a good communication tool that can help get the word out quickly. This is why businesses should have social media pages.
One of the most popular is Instagram. According to studies, the social media platform has around 1 billion users with 500 million actively scrolling through their feed every day. If you’re not on Instagram, you should be.
However, simply being on Instagram won’t drive engagement. Here are tips on how you can write better captions to help connect with your audience better.
Take Your Time & Edit Before Posting
When you take a picture to post on Instagram you take plenty of them before choosing the best ones. Then you add a filter or two and use other photo editing tools to ensure that your photos look good.
But you write the caption in 10 seconds and post right away.
This is a big mistake because you should take just as long or even longer to write an Instagram caption. Just like writing a blog, you need to write a draft first, edit it a couple of times before posting.
Take your time. Write several drafts and then edit them until you feel they are perfect. Your photo isn’t going anywhere and neither are your followers. But don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t take a week or a month to edit your caption. Just put a lot of thought into it because writing drafts and editing can weed out mistakes before you post them.
Spelling mistakes for instance can be disastrous. You want your followers to think you are serious and a professional and spelling blunders make you look like the opposite.
Tag Your Posts With Locations
Tell followers where the photo was taken but don’t include it in the captions – that’s a waste of space. Tag the location of the photo like so:
Had they added the location of the photo in the caption, the message of the photo would have been lost in all the words they had to say.
Another reason to add location is because it will appear with all the other photos tagged in that location. Photos with the most likes and comments will appear in Instagram’s “Top Posts” on that location page. This is a great way for people who don’t follow you to see your posts.
Put Important Info First
Be direct and always lead with the most information first. Instagram allows users 2,200 letters for the caption but followers won’t be able to see all of them right away. Longer posts are usually cut short with the need to hit “more” so that readers can see the rest of the caption.
Generally, shorter captions are better than longer ones. However, this does not mean to say that captions should always be short.
Not everyone wants to click the “more” button to see the whole caption. It’s better to put important info first so that readers can get the gist of your message without needing to click the “more” button.
Encourage Comments
You want each post to have lots of engagement. One of the ways to do this is by getting people to comment on your photos. Users can either talk to each other on the comments or reply directly to you.
Another way to encourage comments is by starting a discussion. For this method to be successful you need to get your audience to participate. End captions with a question to encourage discussion. If you don’t ask they won’t have a reason to write anything.
Drive Traffic To Your Website
For ecommerce sites, the purpose of joining social media platforms like Instagram is to drive traffic to their main websites. To get them to buy something they should click on a link because you can’t purchase directly from Instagram.
To find out where traffic is coming from, you can create a unique URL to see the number of referrals from your IG page. This will help you gauge how successful your Instagram campaign is.
Add the link to your Instagram bio then you can use the caption to refer followers to the link.
Here is a good example:
This photo tells followers what you’re selling and if they’re interested they can click on the link on the bio that brings them directly to the item.
Run A Contest
Contests are great ways to drive engagement of your brand in Instagram. This can help drive engagement especially if write a great caption.
Good examples of a giveaways t include: lottery, sweepstakes and contests. It’s a contest when people need to do something to win a prize and a group of judges determine the winner. For a lottery, people have to buy a ticket to enter and sweepstakes are selecting winners at random.
Lotteries and sweepstakes usually require state and federal compliance and prohibit this types of giveaways so your best bet is a contest.
For example, you can ask followers to design a t-shirt and then post their shirts on Intagram using #TShirtDesignContest.
Use Hashtags
Always include hashtags in your captions. This is for the same reason you need to tag location: so that your post will appear with other images using the same hashtag.
This will expose your brand to a wider audience. If you’re not sure which hashtags to use, Instagram can suggest the most popular ones. Pick the ones with the most posts since this will help drive engagement.
Make sure that hashtags are relevant to your brand. However, use hashtags sparingly because you don’t want your post to look like spam.
Writing good Instagram captions is very important. Not only will it drive engagement, it will also drive traffic to your website.
A Sydney Social Media Marketing Team can help you build ties with your clients. Social media marketing in Instagram can help you interact with clients at a much deeper level compared to traditional advertising.
