Having Trouble Captioning Your Social Media Posts? Make Sure To Read This!

It sucks creating social media posts and not getting the attention it deserves, trust us, we’ve been there, but with these tips, we’ll help you grab the attention of your target audience through captivating titles/captions and help ascertain the attention your content deserves. Cool, let's get started.

1. What's your intent?

So, you’ve gotten your piece of content or social media post ready, but have you stopped to ask yourself, what's the goal? This is a hugely important question that you should be asking before posting any sort of content. If you don’t know your intent, it will be hard to write a caption that captures what you’re trying to do. You should nail down if this is a post to engage with your audience, call them to action, or is it simply to create brand awareness? If you can figure this out, the rest will be much simpler.

2. Get To Talking!

One of the best, and free ways to create post engagement is to encourage your audience to chime in. This can be done through open ended questions pertaining to the subject - here’s an example of a post on our company's LinkedIn page:

Leaving it open for responses helps encourage your audience to communicate on the post, those driving more engagement overall - allowing it to be seen by more people. Also make sure to engage with them as well, especially if they have questions - this might be a great opportunity to reel them in and, eventually, make them customers. Also make sure to make it a question that isn’t a “Yes” or “No” type answer, as that won’t encourage people to comment.

3. Call them to action…but not all the time.

Depending on the post, it may be appropriate to call your audience to action by either engaging with the content/conversation - or to go download/sign up for something on your website. This is a good way to drive traffic to your website, but remember, most people don’t use social media to view sales pitches - it’s okay sometimes, but not all the time. Social media is a great way to generate brand awareness, so try to keep the sales pitches to a minimum, unless you want to lose engagement overall. ​Here's an example of a post with a call to action in it;

4. Give Em’ A Reason.

The great thing about social media is that most of the posts should be fun. Heck - most people only go on there to look at meme’s and funny posts to lighten their day up. A great way to do this is try to add value to their engagement, you can do this by giving them a link to a resource that will help them in their endeavors, or something funny to give them a good laugh. Just like in real life, people engage with people they like, same goes for social media - so keep it light and fun, so people are more willing to engage with you.

5. Walk a mile in their shoes

Put yourself in their place, what are your customers' wants and needs? 

• Should they care about your post? 
• Why should they engage with you?
• How would you perceive your post if you were a potential customer?
• Does this piece of content interest you? 
• Does this caption best reflect what you’re trying to achieve? 

A good practice is to remove yourself from your perspective and try looking at it from a different viewpoint. Also, it’s never bad to have an outside source take a look at what you’re posting beforehand, and get their feedback on it.

6. Be The Best You (Or Company)

Make sure to work in personality to the language of your posts. People like to read content that’s posted by humans, and if you sound Mr.Roboto - people may skip it altogether. Be funny, be quirky, be human, it will pay dividends if done correctly! Check out our long-time client and friend's Instagram Page - Findlay Honda! They have a great Instagram page that really demonstrates how to show a friendly face to your customers!

7. It’s Story Time!

If you’re still not seeing the engagement you want, don’t be afraid to give a story bearing it all. Seeing the human side of the company is a great way to get people to trust you. Success stories, stories of failure and how you recovered, anecdotal situations that you’ve come across, etc. It’s all great stuff that your audience will be more than interested in. People love to connect with others, and giving them a way to through story telling or successes is a great way to do this. Just make sure you’re not talking to them with this story trying to push a narrative - you want to be engaged and entertained with emotional connection.

In Conclusion

So you’ve made it this far - If you remember these tips, you will be on the right track to creating more engaging captions for your social media posts. Just remember, be patient, be human, and be consistent, you got this!

Need some caption suggestions, or have some questions on how we can help you achieve your goals? Reach out to us below! Also, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter here!