Social Media is quickly becoming all about the visuals – especially Instagram. Having a stunning image or a fun video is super important, but don’t forget about the words! The images are how you draw your audience in, but captivating captions are how you snare them.
It’s tempting to stay inside of the box and keep the copy safe but you won’t get nearly as much engagement. Go try it, post a killer picture on Instagram with just average run-of-the-mill copy and then try it again after employing our handy tips for creating captivating captions, trust us, you’ll get way better engagement. So, what are these fancy tips we’re talking about? Read on, good friend!
Who You Talkin’ To?
Know your audience. I know we preach on this fairly often, but that’s because in all communications it is SOOOOO important to know who you are talking to. Know your audience. Know your primary, secondary and tertiary audiences and talk to them.
Say What?
It’s not just about what you say, it’s about how you say it. Be conversational. We would probably be talking to you like this is you were sitting right in front of us. When you are writing your social media captions, pretend someone from your audience is sitting right in front of you. Would you say, “we have a sale happening.” OR would you say “We have a killer deal on these skateboard’s you like.”
Yeah, it’s definitely the latter.
Don’t Have to Talk Forever, Ya know…
Just because you have 2,000 characters, doesn’t mean you have to use all of them. Less is almost always more – especially with Instagram. People scroll through feeds awfully quickly, they don’t want to have to click ‘read more’ if the first few words weren’t interesting enough. If you are promoting an event, sure you probably need 200 characters or more. If you just have a cool picture that says almost everything you need, just put up some emoticons with it! (Yes, emoticons are captions too! But remember not everyones device reads emoticons the same, so try to limit your use of the super out there ones)
Placement
Put the really important stuff at the beginning. What is your audience going to care about most? Put it first, most people don’t read the whole caption, at least they get the most important information. Ie. Time and date of your event and why they should come.
Hashtags and Mentions
Hashtags are such a touchy subject. With Instagram and Twitter, hashtags are paramount. But don’t throw a million and one hashtags throughout the whole thing, it really makes it hard to read. With twitter, put a hashtag or two at the end. With Instagram, you can use more hashtags than twitter and with Facebook, less really is more. If you are talking about someone in your post, throw a little love their way and mention them!
Calls to Action
Remember our post the other week about calls to action? Your social media caption is the place to do it. Tell people what they should do with the information you just gave them.
Running social media marketing may seem like an easy task, but it takes a lot of time and energy to really do it right. If you feel like you need some help, give us a call! We can have a chat about how the fine folks at talonX will get you running smoothly.