After obsessing over the popular Netflix series Bridgerton, it wasn’t just the outfit inspiration that many of us were mirroring, but also Lady Whistledown’s well-spoken narrative in our best British accents. Her story-telling tone of voice had us reenacting the series, and some of us even went old school and got out our notebooks and diaries to write down our daily events and occurrence.
Why then are we so invested in the storytelling way of narrative and not using it on our own social media channels? Some people like short, sweet, and snappy captions which are easy on the eye and focus more on the post, however, others enjoy delving more into a personals life and enjoy a little longer read. You can have both an amazing, engaging post, and also a spot-on caption – it doesn’t have to be one or the other. But what makes an engaging caption?
Some key things to think about before we carry on are; establishing a tone of voice for your page and making sure you’re keeping it consistent, providing context to what you are posting, adding some humour if relevant as everyone loves a good laugh, and finally encourage your followers to engage some way with a call-to-action or question.
Firstly, an Instagram caption is a description of roughly 300 words which includes text, emojis, hashtags, and normal tags for other pages. Your Instagram post is just the base or sauce of the dish, however, your caption is the ingredients. Good captions drive better and higher engagement, and one of the biggest trends in 2021 for creators was the power of long-form captions ultimately helping to engage with their followers. This trend has definitely followed into 2022 and in a blog by Later, Sarah Nicola Landry who has 2.1 million followers on Instagram explained that “Once I started to put value in the written word, I began to see a huge return.” She added “I’d put up a post with a short snappy caption and then a similar post with a long-form caption. I saw so much more engagement and shares on the long-form post.”
By creating longer captions, you provide value to your audience. They feel a closer connection to who you are depicting yourself as and it adds a sense of reliability. Use lines to break the text and add emojis for a pop of colour. According to a blog post by iqhashtags.com, ‘as of 2022, the only place you should insert your hashtags is the caption! The best place for hashtags became a hot topic once again – regarding recent announcements from Adam Mosseri! He recently stated that you should place hashtags in the caption rather than the first comment to boost your chances of appearing higher in search results.‘
Having researched whether longer captions may be more beneficial than shorter captions, there are some suggestions that a higher engagement rate comes from longer captions, but the debate is still ongoing. As a guide and article on the topic, we recommend using longer captions as Instagram now has more features to find people and places easier, therefore, with more words in the caption relating to your niche, Instagram is likely to rank you higher in search and on feed.
Let’s put it this way, your caption should be longer than one sentence but shorter than a book!
Do you prefer to write longer captions or shorter captions? Let us know by tweeting us @itpliveme.