Why have a strong formula for creating captions for social media posts? Even on content-driven platforms like Instagram, your pictures, graphics, and videos can't do all the work. Using written language to explicitly push the viewer to commit to a certain action will help to accomplish the goal of your post in the first place.
The Building Blocks for a Solid Caption
These three items in the order they are shared are my formula for a caption that will maintain the viewer's attention from start to finish.
An Attention Grabber
Relevant Information (about your image, video, or graphic)
A Call-To-Action
Think of your caption like an essay that you would write in primary school - each written "body" requires a beginning, middle, and end. How you stylize each of these portions of your caption is up to you, with personalization options like your language, word choices, and emojis. Let's talk about each of these portions of our caption and their function.
1- Attention Grabbers
According to Neal Shaffer, as a content creator, you have less than eight seconds to capture someone's attention on social media. What can you explicitly say to someone that will grab and keep their attention within under eight seconds?
Using a quick and stand-alone one-liner, or "hook," at the top of your caption will provide a singular point of focus that will catch your viewers' eye. There are many types of hooks that you can use. Neal recommends the use of the five w's- "who, what, when, where, and why" statements. Ink For All also shares these different foundations for hooks:
Make use of numbers (i.e. - share a statistic)
Evoke emotions
Employ superlatives
Now that the viewer has decided to continue reading, sharing relevant information will tie the visual content and the caption together.
2- Relevant Information
Relevant information serves a subconscious purpose in your caption, as the delivery of information or knowledge will establish your account as a reliable source of education within your industry. However, sharing too much information, or using too many words, might also scare away the viewer. Be concise in your relevant information. Influencer Marketing Hub suggests that you keep your caption length narrowed down to 138 to 150 characters. In general, sharing about 2-3 short sentences would be ideal.
Once the viewer has been informed about what it is your brand is sharing, it's time to encourage them to act on that information!
3- Call to Action
Everyone in marketing is familiar with the "call to action," or CTA for short. The CTA is a much talked about term in the marketing and social media industry because it's so vital to your brand's message. It's what pushes your viewer to take, well... action!
There are, of course, many forms of CTA's that can be employed to drive different actions within your viewer. Alex Cattoni shares these types of goals that CTA's can be used to attain:
Building Engagement
Supporting Lead Generation
Driving Sales
Not every CTA has to be a demand to make a purchase, an appointment, or create any other type of revenue (but how great would that be if it worked that way?!). Instead, encouraging viewers to engage with your content in some form- liking, sharing, saving, or commenting- helps to create an active community that will help to organically boost your content in return.
Bring it all Together.
Once you have all your elements ready to go, the overall length of your caption will be between 3-5 sentences. The end goal of every post and caption should be too, at the bare minimum, make a connection with your viewer. Consider the language and the format you should use to connect with the people you want to attract to your community. After the foundation and formula for your caption are laid out, bring everything together by making your caption unique, with your language, emojis, and hashtags.
Make it your goal to connect with your viewers and engage with them through your platforms; from there your sales, lead generation, and revenue will fall into place.
I hope you've found this helpful! I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback, so please, feel free to drop them in the comments or reach out to me via my "contact" form.
Until next time!
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