Most people nowadays are used to post in Instagram about most aspects of their lives, such as the places they traveled to, their favorite movie or what they are eating. Businesses, on the other hand, see content creation a more efficient way to promote their services and products compared to traditional marketing.
But what do you actually need to do in order to create good content that will make sure your post is viewed by all you followers and generate the most interactions? The answer should be in the captions, which when correctly written can be powerful tools to encourage likes and comments. Here are a few tips to write attention-grabbing posts that will get more likes and comment.
Knowing your audience
First of all, you should be aware of who you are addressing your content to, in other words, this is called “knowing the audience”. It shouldn’t be something hard to know if you don’t have many followers and it is your personal account. Business profiles have dedicated built-in demographics tools that will help them direct the content to the target audience.
But common sense should apply here. You shouldn’t be using a lot of emojis or making ‘meme’ references in a serious, professional-guided post or use dozens of overcomplicated irrelevant sentences in a simple picture with your friends.
Grabbing attention with the first few words
Instagram captions are limited to 2,200 words, although the first 125 characters will be displayed without having to click the “… More” button. This means that you have to follow a similar technique that journalists use in their writing, which is adding a headline that is related to your picture and can summarize your idea and draw curiosity to it. Check National Geographic’s feed for the perfect examples of well written and summarized captions.
For example, a picture of an empty ashtray with the captions starting with “How I quit smoking by using nicotinepouches ” or “Why is this ashtray empty? It all started when…” should draw people’s attention right away to the rest of your captions.
Encouraging comments
Apart from the likes, comments are particularly important to generate engagement and make sure your content is viewed by even more people. There are a few strategies adopted by many content creators to make more people comment. The first one is to ask a direct or intriguing question related to your post, such as “Do you prefer 1 or 2? Let me know in the comments!”. Telling people to tag a friend or someone who relates to the post is very useful as well, and usually generates replies to the tagged comment itself.
Using hashtags
People follow specific hashtags to see different content in their feed from everyone that mentions it in the captions.
Don’t use too many of them, try to stick with a few popular hacks that are related to your post and are short in length.
Drafting and reviewing
Finally, as in any good presentation or essay, creating a draft and reviewing the captions should be part of the perfect writing drill.
If possible, get someone else to read it before posting to see things from a different perspective, and possibly catch some errors you weren’t able to find.
