Social media captions shouldn’t be an afterthought. They’re what attract reader attention and encourage your followers to take action. When you look at it like that, they’re one of the most important aspects of your social posts and your marketing strategy in general.
If you’re looking to boost engagement on your social channels and drive more conversions and sales, you might need to tweak your captions.
What makes a strong social media caption?
Strong social media captions follow these two things:
- Purpose: they have a goal in mind and drive readers towards that end goal
- Personality: they showcase your brand’s tone of voice and are personable to the average reader
Regardless of what channel you’re posting on, the product or service you’re selling, and the audience you’re targeting, these two things are absolutely crucial. Purpose gives you something to work towards and makes it easier to track whether you’re getting the results you want. Personality differentiates you from other, similar brands and helps you create deeper connections with your followers (which, in turn, builds trust, loyalty, and brand awareness).
As well as this, good social media captions also provide value. Readers leave having learned something, or maybe having had a laugh. Whatever the end goal is, you should be able to add value. This is what makes your post stand out in user feeds and creates excitement in anticipation of your next post.
How to choose a purpose
There can be many different purposes of a social post, including:
- Driving traffic to your website
- Increasing social reach
- Sharing your latest giveaway
- Selling more products from your newest product line
- Attracting media attention
Choosing the purpose of each post requires you to think about what the end goal is: what do you want followers to do when they’ve finished reading your caption? Why are you posting this particular piece of content?
When you can answer these two questions, you can start to think about a purpose that you can craft your caption around.
How to showcase your personality
Your personality is one of the things that sets your brand apart from others and sparks connections with like-minded users. Having a defined tone of voice helps you keep your social captions consistent, which is crucial in creating a personality for your brand that people can relate to. On top of this, consider how you would interact with your target audience if you were talking to them in person. Writing like you would speak adds personality to your posts and makes your brand come across as warm and human.
The best social captions also add value and aren’t just there for the sake of writing something. This ties in with having a purpose; the more meaning there is to your posts, the more likely they are to provide value to your followers.
8 easy tips for writing good social media captions
1. Include a call-to-action
Calls-to-action (CTAs) tell people what to do next. If you want to direct them to a product page on your website, do so. This creates a cohesive journey that keeps users going through the sales cycle.
Your CTA will depend on the purpose of your post, but it could be:
- Visit our website to find out more
- Sign up for our newsletter
- Claim your discount through the link in our bio
- Download our new ebook
- Book a call with us today
Jasper’s Instagram photos caption template helps create social media captions in bulk that you can copy and paste on your favorite social media platforms.
2. Tell a story
Telling a story through your post captions helps secure relationships with your customers and increase engagement. Create a narrative that encourages your followers to keep reading. For example, you can share a struggle you’ve had, a personal anecdote, or take your reader on a journey that they can relate to. This not only helps showcase your brand personality, but it also provides little moments to generate a deeper connection with your audience.
3. Create a two-way dialogue
Social media is, at its core, a social platform. People expect to engage on there - in fact, 54% of people browse their social channels to find products and services to buy. Encouraging conversation will help attract new customers and help you create long-term connections with them.
Think about what you want to start discussions about. One sentence about your new product release probably isn’t going to spark a conversation, but if you add a question at the end you encourage people to join in.
So, instead of a simple “check out our new product”, try something like “here’s our new product, which color is your favorite?”. Using open-ended questions is a much better way to generate a response than closed questions that require a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
4. Get to know your audience
It’s really hard to connect with your audience through your social captions if you don’t know who they are or what they want and need from you. Digging into your social analytics to find out which posts resonate the best with your followers and their key demographics is a good starting point, but you can go further than that and:
- Send out surveys to your customers to find out more about their likes and interests
- Interview some of your best customers to dig deeper into their biggest challenges and dreams
- Listen to what they’re posting and sharing on social media to identify what they care about
- Use social media features, like polls on Stories to find out more about what your audience likes
When you understand your audience, you can use your social media caption ideas to tap into their wants, needs, interests, and challenges to increase engagement and loyalty.
5. Make the first sentence count
Many social media channels will have a character limit for the amount of text they show users in their feeds. Because of this, it’s important to make the first sentence count if you want people to continue reading.
Capturing the attention of scrollers is hard, but taking the time to make your first sentence compelling and inviting will increase the chances of your audience reading the whole of your caption and taking the desired action you want them to at the end.
Use the first sentence to ask a question, aggravate a pain point, or show you understand their needs.
6. Incorporate emojis (if it’s a good fit)
Social media is a fun way to connect with your audience. If your brand voice and personality allow it, don’t be afraid to get creative with emojis and other visual elements. Of course, you don’t want to go too over the top, but sprinkling in relevant emojis here and there can lighten up your captions and connect with younger audiences.
7. Research the right hashtags
Hashtags present a great opportunity for increasing your reach on social channels. They expose your posts to new audiences and give you visibility in your industry - but it’s important that you choose the right ones.
Spend some time researching which hashtags your audience is using and incorporate those into your captions. Some brands will add them to the end of their captions, but you can also sprinkle them throughout for a more organic feel.
To find the right hashtags to use, you can check out the ones your competitors are using or use a tool to find out what’s popular in your niche.
Need help finding good hashtags? Try our Instagram Hashtag Generator.
8. Experiment with length
What’s the perfect length for a social caption? The answer is it truly depends on the channel you’re posting on and the audience you’re trying to reach. Some channels are geared for short, snappy captions, while others lend themselves to longer ones.
According to research, a good Instagram caption length is 150 characters, while Twitter posts perform better if they’re longer at between 240 and 259 characters. And even though Facebook allows for incredibly lengthy posts up to 63,000 characters, the sweet spot is just 50 characters.
Experiment with different caption lengths to see which ones get the most engagement with your audience.
Examples of brands with great social media posts
1. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo’s Facebook captions are full of character and questions to drive engagement and showcase their fun personality.
2. Datadog
Datadog’s Insta posts speak directly to their audience and finish up with a question to spark a two-way conversation.
3. Atlassian Confluence
Atlassian Confluence incorporates emojis into its Twitter captions and invites its followers to share their opinions and experiences for increased engagement.
4. Bombas
Sock brand Bombas has some of the best Instagram captions. The brand is great at telling stories, which helps create a deeper connection with customers while increasing engagement.
5. Packlane
Packlane’s Facebook captions are full of personality with emojis and a clear CTA to boot.
Generate engaging social captions with Jasper
Jasper’s powerful selection of templates makes it a breeze to generate the perfect caption at scale. If you’ve got any big social media marketing campaigns coming up, simply add what the posts are about and it will serve you multiple captions you can use right away. Try the Jasper Bootcamp to level up your efforts and continue to create engaging social captions.
