Is your Instagram engagement down? (It’s a big fat yes from me.) Do you think it’s time to reboot your strategy to try and pick things up again? (Another big fat yes from me.) If so, it might be time to learn how to make your Instagram captions more engaging — and it’s a lot easier than you might think.
Engaging captions are ones that lure people in and encourage them to want to learn, read, or see more.
They make people want to join in with a conversation or respond to something you’ve said.
In turn, this leads to comments, opinions, answers to your questions, etc … which are all forms of engagement.
More engagement means that Instagram will show your content to more people, which generates more engagement, which generates greater reach. It’s like one big engagement circle.
Today, I have eight tricks to share with you, that all help to make your Instagram captions more engaging, easier to read, and more interesting.
Grab yourself a coffee, get yourself comfortable, let’s take a peek …
1 – Start with a greeting
Most conversations start with a greeting, right? Doesn’t it make sense to apply the rule to your online interactions, specifically Instagram captions?
Why not start off with a friendly “hello” or “good morning”? It’s quick, easy, to the point, and enables you to slide into whatever you plan to talk about.
2 – Ask an intriguing question
An intriguing question is a bit like a clickbait title: it lures someone in because they simply MUST learn more.
A few examples of intriguing, clickbait-style questions are:
- Is your Instagram engagement garbage right now?
- Would you like to know how I turned 400 followers on Instagram into 1,500 blog views per month?
- Are you interested in learning about my WORST makeup experience ever?
- Do you want to take a deep-dive into my WORST fashion disasters?
- Would you like to hear about that time I paid for an Instagram guide and got the crappiest advice ever?
Look at what you’re talking about in your Instagram post; if your post was an answer to a question, what would the question be?
3 – Start with a surprising statistic
This works in very much the same way as click-bait-style questions and titles: it surprises someone or intrigues them into having no choice but to read/swipe/watch and learn more.
For example:
75% of internet users think that blog posts with stats (data) are more persuasive than blog posts without.
Source: Survey Monkey
You’ll get 24% more shares if your blog post’s title has a question mark at the end.
Source: Backlinko
24 is the average number of posts you’ll need to publish before you start seeing ‘real’ traffic on your blog.
Source: Traffic Generation Cafe
~ I came across these stats when creating 100+ Blogging Statistics For 2020 | Blogging Wizard.
Using stats and data in your content helps to prove your point — to show that what you’re saying is based on fact rather than just your opinion.
If you use content (such as stats) found on other websites, make sure you always give appropriate credit for it.
Bonus points: tag in the statistic’s source on Instagram — the source might then share your post to their story, meaning extra exposure for you.
4 – Start with a quote, proverb, or song lyric
But try to make it relevant to what you’re talking about in your post or feed — although this isn’t necessary.
I’ve seen the most random images used with the most random captions on Instagram, from some of the biggest bloggers and influencers. This proves a point I’ve made a couple of times before: your caption and your image don’t actually need to be related to each other.
(I can’t personally live like this. My images need to be related to my caption otherwise my brain will explode.)
5 – Give your post a blog post-like title
You’d give a blog post a title.
You’d give a YouTube video a title.
You even give a Pinterest Pin a title.
So … why wouldn’t you give Instagram posts a title?
Titles help to introduce a topic of conversation, giving your audience a little insight into what they’ll see if they carry on reading/scrolling/watching.
But that’s not the only reason to include a title in your Instagram captions …
Instagram has started to adopt a more keyword-based approach to searches. Once upon a time, hashtags were the link between content and people; you’d type a hashtag into the search bar and be shown posts that included the hashtag in the results. Things are starting to head in a different direction, though — Instagram is adopting keywords.
Keywords on Instagram are used in the same way as keywords in a blog post — and one of the main places you should insert your keyword in both, is in the title.
6 – Always, always, always end with a call-to-action
And by always, I mean ALWAYS.
Blog posts, email newsletters, social media posts — they should ALL contain a call-to-action at the end.
- Check out the blog post, link in bio.
- Sign up to my email newsletter to get the freebie today!
- Make sure you check me out on Twitter – and say hi, so I follow you right back.
- Slide into my DMs if you have any questions. I can’t wait to hear from you!
All of the above are examples of call-to-actions. They’re things you want your audience/followers to do once they’re finished with your content.
What are those people going to do otherwise?
Click away and find something else to read/see/do on the internet?
You want to keep them on YOUR content, don’t you? Or buying YOUR products/services?
7 – Split up big chunks of text
People don’t like to read long chunks of text. That’s why short sentences and paragraphs are encouraged in blog posts, with headings/subheadings sprinkled in to help make things easy to find and super readable.
You should take the same approach with your Instagram captions.
Which of the following two Instagram captions do YOU Think is the easiest to read?
You can insert line breaks by simply pressing the enter key. This is a relatively new addition; Instagram used to remove the line breaks when you did this, but you could get around it by typing up the caption in Notes/another app and then copy/pasting into the caption space.
8 – Use funky fonts
I’m going to throw a little disclaimer out there before I get started on this one: some of the funky fonts you can use to spice up your social media captions are ridiculously impossible to read, so make smart choices when using them.
There are a few websites offering funky/fancy fonts for social media captions, bios, etc., but these are the three I use the most:
You simply tap in (or paste in) your words and scroll down to find the font you like. Copy and paste the fonted version (yes, I just made up that term) into your Instagram caption, and boom, you’ve used funky fonts to make things interesting.
I personally like to use bold funky fonts as “titles” for my Instagram captions, and I also like to use them to make certain words bold/obvious throughout.
Make Your Instagram Captions More Engaging ~ Summary
1 – Start with a greeting
2 – Ask an intriguing question
3 – Start with a surprising statistic
4 – Start with a quote, proverb, or song lyric
5 – Give your post a blog post-like title
6 – Always end with a call-to-action
7 – Split up big chunks of text
8 – Use funky fonts
I hope you’ve found this blog post useful today, but please feel free to give me a shout if you have questions of your own.
Alternatively, why not take a peek at some of the other posts on my blog?
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