Caption Writing Made Simple

The ever-expanding digital world has cracked open new ways to connect and grow your brand’s audience. With the average person spending 3 hours on social networks every day, social media marketing is a brilliant way to reach and engage a wider following – but inexperienced caption writing can squander this opportunity (Oberlo, 2020).

Here are some of our suggestions to help you write effective social media captions that will reach all four corners of the digital world.

Social media marketing is a conversation between you and your audience. As such, to ensure your captions have the best impact it’s crucial to understand both your own brand identity and the groups of people you want to talk to. While writing your copy consider these three questions:

• What is your brand? – Visualise your brand or organisation as a person. What sort of person would they be, what sort of interests would they have, what sort of projects would they produce? Establishing your brand identity in this way helps you discover your brand voice, and determines what sort of tone and approach you should take when caption writing.
• What is your message? – Establish your messaging and intent online. What are you hoping to achieve, in each post and in each campaign? Without a clear vision of what you mean to do, your captions will lack focus. Take a moment to consider your aims, whether you want your audience to watch a video, click a link or post a comment, and you’ll find it much easier to craft an effective call to action in your caption.
• And finally, the most important question of all: who are you actually talking to? – Conversations are a two-way street. While it’s important to show who you are and what you stand for in your copy, it’s equally as important to understand the people conducting a conversation with you. Get to know them, find out how they interact on social media, what they’re interested in. This will allow you to style your copy and address your audience in a much more effective way.

Answer these questions and you’ll find your captions will be clearer, more in line with your target audience and helping people form a better connection with your content online.

Once you’ve narrowed down your brand identity, message and audience, you can begin to enhance your copy on this foundation. There are 5 key aspects of your captions you should consider when doing so:

• Conversation
• Be responsive
• Calls to Action
• Hashtags
• Emojis

First and foremost, social media marketing is a conversation you’re having with your audience. Asking a question at the beginning or end of your caption is a fantastic way to allow your audience to engage and offer up their opinions, thoughts and ideas in the comment section.

And when your audience engages you in conversation, it’s crucial to be responsive. Make your audience feel heard. Interacting with your audience’s comments or tweets encourages continued engagement with your content, and gives your brand or organisation a more organic, human feel.

Calls to action are another key component of enhanced caption writing. Armed with knowledge of your overarching intent and message, you can construct captions directing your audience to certain assets, posts, links or content that will help you achieve your aims. Start cycling phrases like ‘Learn more’, ‘Watch this’, ‘Comment below’ and ‘Find out more’ into your caption vocabulary.

If you’re looking to expand your online audience with your captions, hashtags are the best place to start. Consistently using the same hashtags in your social media campaigns and developing key brand hashtags you and your audience can use when discussing your content online is a brilliant way to help your captions reach new audiences and encourage further engagement.

And finally, don’t forget to consider the wide array of emojis on offer. When it comes to humanising your online brand, almost nothing is more effective than using an emoji. It’s been found that emojis make audiences feel like a brand is more friendly, and more competent (HubSpot, 2018). By using emojis in your captions to hit a more emotive tone you can encourage an increase in audience interaction with your content.

While it’s undeniably important to know what you should be doing when writing an effective social media caption, it’s absolutely crucial to know what copywriting pitfalls to avoid at all costs.

Make sure you’re not using complicated words and phrases, or technical language not accessible to your general audience. Simple language helps your audience get to your point much faster, and makes it easier for them to know how they should be interacting and responding. No one wants to be scratching their head for 5 minutes puzzling out a twitter post.

Use hashtags in moderation. They are a dependable tool for increasing reach and engagement, but don’t overuse them. Keep them relevant, keep them short and tailor them to the platform they’re on. The number of hashtags you should include can vary – on Instagram 7-9 is the ideal number, and on Twitter it should be no more than 1-2.

For anyone struggling to make their point online, hopefully this copywriting breakdown has shown you the simple side to caption writing. If you’d like to dive further into the world of copy, please let us know and we can support you.