How To Write Awesome Social Media Captions

Social media relies heavily on visual content like photos and videos, yet the captions you use can be just as, if not more, important. The social media copy you craft helps to relay your brand’s voice and provide a human element to your content. The combination of visual and written elements is a powerful branding tool.

In this post, we’ll use several different terms, so it’s helpful to define them upfront:

• Copywriting: the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing.
• Copy: the product of copywriting, written content that aims to increase brand awareness and ultimately persuade a person or group to take a particular action.
• Sales Copy: a form of copy that aims to persuade a reader to take a specific action — to buy a product, inquire about your service, join your email list, download a free report, or follow you on social media.
• Social Media Caption: copy of varying lengths used to describe an image or video that someone posts online.

Social media copy can include a caption, a call-to-action, a headline, a sub-headline, and even a destination URL. At each of these access points, you have an opportunity to practice great copywriting to help reinforce your brand messaging.

Every element of a social media post should evoke the brand’s mission, vision, values and purpose. Great content should never detract from the core message and purpose. The consistent use of both written and visual branding elements in your social media posts should reinforce brand cohesiveness and communicate a specific feeling and emotion to your audience.

Sell copy can enlighten your audience about a brand experience and relay important information or updates. When you create social media copy, think about how your words will reinforce any content creation, increase brand awareness, and ultimately persuade your audience to take a particular action.

From Facebook to Instagram, Twitter to LinkedIn, each platform has a different audience and manner in which you can effectively communicate. However, there are a few things to keep in mind — regardless of the platform — that will ensure your ability to create awesome social media captions.

PUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS FIRST

Depending on the platform, there are varying character lengths allowed. Some are very short and will challenge your ability to get your message across in as few words as possible, while others are relatively long and allow you to compose long-form mini-blogs.

Regardless of how many characters are allowed, you can almost guarantee your message will be truncated — shortened to the first few lines. Does this mean you should always limit yourself to short captions? Not necessarily. 

Use only as many words as you need — if your caption is on the longer side, make sure you put the most important information upfront while keeping hashtags and mentions for the end. Even if your message is truncated and the user doesn’t click to read more, they’ll definitely see the most important information.

UTILIZE YOUR BRAND VOICE

Just because you’re posting an irreverent GIF or image on social media doesn’t mean you can disregard your brand voice — consistency and authenticity is vital for brand recognition. Voice is one of the hardest branding elements to nail down, but it’s crucial that your social media post captions are not in conflict with the voice used in your website copy, press releases, blog posts, marketing collateral, video scripts, etc.

Even while utilizing your brand’s unique voice, you still need to pay attention to what social network you’re posting to — each platform has a different tone that works better than the others. For example, long-form, formal captions work best on LinkedIn, while concise and witty works well on Twitter.

USE EMOJIS

Emojis — ideograms and smileys used in constantly in texts and oftentimes on web pages — have exploded in popularity, and various categories exist including facial expressions, food, common objects, places, types of weather, and animals.

Emojis aren’t just for tweens and teens — emojis equal engagement:

• Tweets featuring emojis increase engagement by 25.4% (source)
• Facebook posts experience an impressive 57% lift (source)
• Instagram content with emojis see an engagement increase of 48% (source)
• Comments and shares increase by about 33% when emojis are present (source)

Brands that use emojis in their social media captions give help relay brand personality and often help to convey messages that words simply can’t.

DON’T FORGET A CALL-TO-ACTION

You can build a large and engaged audience on social media, but if you don’t instruct them on what to do next, you’ve missed a tremendous opportunity. Including a call-to-action with a link to download a content offer or subscribe to your newsletter is a great way to capitalize on social media traffic and successfully drive that traffic to your website.

Simple and straightforward is best when building your calls-to-action. Use strong action verbs to leave no doubt in your audience’s mind of what they should do. Words that create enthusiasm and answer the question, “what’s in it for me” typically perform well.

Expanding your brand reach on social media by posting engaging content and captions is indispensable. Providing a call-to-action is that extra step that will take your brand awareness to new levels. 

CROSS-PROMOTE

A great social media strategy should include consistent and authentic brand expression on a variety of different social media platforms. However, that doesn’t mean your brand should have a presence on every single social media platform. Determining the best social media channels for your brand involves asking yourself which social media platform will allow you to genuinely engage with the right audience for your brand.

Cross promoting your presence on one channel to another channel is one of the easiest ways to create content and also increase your followers.

• Step 1: compose and post a Tweet to Twitter
• Step 2: screenshot the Tweet and create a simple image from it
• Step 3: compose and post that simple image on Instagram and/or Facebook

In this example, not only are you creating easy content to help fill your content calendar, but you’re also ensuring that your audiences on Instagram and Facebook also know that you have a presence on Twitter.

You don’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning author to compose awesome copy. Keeping a few things top-of-mind when you’re posting to social media will ensure that you can increase brand awareness and engagement.

REMEMBER:

• Put the most important things first
• Utilize your brand voice
• Use emojis
• Don’t forget a call-to-action
• Cross-promote

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Skaggs is the co-founder of BODDHI Branding, a creative agency with a vision to authentically and creatively construct stories to help your brand grow. Digital and social media, branding, recruitment and content strategy are all functions Chris has developed building teams, processes and strategies from the ground-up. Dedicated to giving back Chris also co-founded Leighton’s Gift, a non-profit with a mission of turning a tragedy into something positive. He also serves on the boards of a variety of different organizations. A natural storyteller, Chris’ work and experiences have been featured on CNN, Marketing Sherpa, Thrive Global, CBS Radio, Recruiter.com and Glassdoor. Get connected online, @chrislskaggs.