If you are a small business owner in need of promotion, or a business selling product, service or brand, you cannot ignore Instagram’s reach. According to a TechCrunch report , Instagram is the fastest-growing social media platform service with more than 1 million Wall Street users, and that number continues to grow.
It’s no wonder that you post great images and videos on your Instagram business account feed, but you’ll need to pay attention to the captions (descriptive text) for effective exposure.
Instagram is a visual platform for displaying photos and videos, but it can be a comprehensive channel for marketing results that can increase your website, follower count, and sales.
With visually effective images or videos on Instagram, you can increase the staying time of potential customers and stimulate purchase, but it is not easy to convert customers through captions (explanatory text).
Since captions (explanatory phrases) play an important role in Instagram’s algorithm, writing a compelling and compelling copyright introduction is an important means for followers to feel the need for products, services, and brands, and to increase sales. can be.
In short, captions help improve the marketing effectiveness of Instagram posts and increase sales.
With the recent update of Instagram’s algorithm , it means that if the platform likes the user’s participation rate, the probability of posting more exposure and being shown increases. This metric will determine whether you are receiving a lot of user comments for your post and whether you are responding to those comments. This change is that simply having a large number of followers doesn’t guarantee you’ll get more exposure. In other words, if there are no comments and no responses, they may not be visible.
Earlier this year, Instagram explained in its official Twitter account how the Instagram algorithm works:
“We want to limit the reach of photos to 7% of our followers and fix it with news on Instagram.”
“The first thing you see in your feed is determined by the posts and accounts you engage the most, as well as other factors such as the timeliness of your posts, how often you use Instagram, and the number of users you follow.”
“I haven’t changed my feed ranking recently and I don’t hide posts from people I follow. Keep scrolling to keep you visible. Again, your feed is personalized and evolves over time depending on how you use Instagram.✌️”
What does this mean?
First of all, what appears at the top of your Instagram user channel is based on your personal activity, so you need to engage your business channel so that you can do this for how long users will stay, like, comment or share.
How can captions help you accomplish these task activities?
Before writing the caption (descriptive text), you should be able to describe the main goals of your Instagram strategy. The general goals are as follows:
– Usually run awareness campaigns to increase visibility or increase brand awareness (this can increase your reach and follower count, or increase traffic to your website for awareness purposes).
– Promotion of sales, new product launches or new product launches.
– Collection of user-generated content using product, service, and brand hashtags
If you have an Instagram business account, you can also opt for sponsored advertising posts (promotional posts) to be visible by photo or target.
When you register for sponsored advertising posts, there are several ways to induce action.
Supported call to action button options include Contact Us, Learn More, Book Now, and Download. In addition, you can operate a shop using the Instagram product tag function.
If you’re not investing money in Instagram ads and are using purely organic events, etc., you can try two calls to action.
Encourage your followers and potential followers to read your caption, go to your profile and click on the link in your profile.
You can also entice your followers to like or comment, or to share.
Everyone knows that you can’t link to regular posts on Instagram, so you need to convince users to click on Instagram’s profile link to visit your website or product page.
Tips for writing effective Instagram captions
1. Description text length
: Instagram caption can contain up to 2,200 characters, and can include up to 30 hashtags.
Like most marketing strategies, captions should value quality over length.
Captions can be short and concise, or feature long, deep content.
2. Make the most of the first sentence
Instagram doesn’t show the caption after 3-4 lines, so be sure to include important details at the beginning of the description.
Since only the first sentence appears in the user feed, we recommend that you don’t include impressive phrases in the first sentence or ask a question and call to action at the end.
Like other social networking services, Instagram, please do not copy and paste explanatory text.
If there is the same phrase in the first 2-3 of all posts, it is disadvantageous to induce action.
3. Ask for action or ask a question.
Each post must have a purpose and intent, so each post should be written so that it can be directed to a specific purpose.
What do you want your followers to do?
– Visit website
– Buy specific products
– Share news with friends
– Event shopping
– Contest participation or donation
– Share current photos using specified hashtags (a great way to collect user-generated content)
Building a foundation for communication and encouraging potential customers to engage is key. This is a measure of how your posts are exposed to your followers, and if you engage them, you’re more likely to mark your posts as’recommended accounts’ in other users’ feeds.
Here are some things you can do with captions (explanatory text)
– Click the link in your profile.
– In general, answer questions and leave comments.
-Tag your friends (a great trick to expand your reach)
– Use product, service, and brand hashtags
4. Added value
It provides all kinds of information to increase the added value of posts, appeals to users, and writes them so that they can share and bookmark more.
5. Be truthful
Integrity is paramount.
Please write as you say so that you can show your true self in the description. It can be intentionally used to show promotional purposes, but it should be written so that it comes naturally and friendly.
6. Draft captions using a separate platform or tool
If you use other tools to write explanatory text, you can think less distracting than writing it yourself and write your content faithfully.
If you write and formalize the phrase in advance, fill in the caption and post a reservation while supplementing the additional description that fits the content, you can write the most complete post caption (description) that fits the situation at that time.
7. Use storytelling
Express objective and detailed descriptions more specifically than weekly expressions.
Please describe in detail using expressions such as sight, touch, taste, emotion, and feeling.
8. Write fun using emoticons
Add emoticons to get rid of the frustration and energize your description.
You can indicate the end of the character by adding the relevant emoticon to the end of the sentence.
Emoticons serve to guide users who check your post to take action.
If you outsource your brand identity and text descriptions, decide on a reasonable set of emoticons to be consistent and maintain your brand.
If you need to use some emoji to link to your profile or focus on important text within your captions, you can also use the emoji below.
👉 👆 💥 🔗 🎯 📌 📍
9. Use of hashtags
Instagram hashtags are a key way to make your posts searchable, so make sure to use them properly.
Hashtags are used like keywords because they have tracking and search capabilities.
Hashtags can be grouped and added at the end of the description text, or products, services, and brands can be organized and listed under the’Learn more’ tag.
Some even add periods to multiple lines to separate hashtags and actually separate them from the description space.
This is acceptable, but you shouldn’t add a lot of hashtags.
So, how do you know which hashtag to use?
You should use a combination of other trending hashtags related to your product, service, or community of your brand (hashtags used by people in your industry or by users you want to follow).
Record hashtags and post content used by competitors, prospects, influencers and industry leaders.
Checklist for posting good captions for Instagram posts
Please check the following checklist before filling out the caption.
– Is it beneficial?
: Is it providing information or details about your product promotion or your company?
-Is it in the product, service, or brand?
: Do you think users are following your needs and overall requests?
-Do you require action?
: Is there a clear phrase at the end of the text telling the user to do something? Is there a clear phrase telling the user to do something?
-Is it clean?
: Is the caption simple and neat? Or does the text, emoticons and hashtags look cluttered?
-Does it inspire or value?
: Include something that allows users to communicate with other followers by commenting on the post, such as something to get from the post or new information or donation activity.
