8 Tips to Create Value in Social Media Captioning
Our world has become digitized, allowing our writing to be seen on a global scale on platforms that have their own standards of writing, which is both awesome and daunting. We don’t want you to have to press the delete button too many times, so we’ve created a list of 8 tips you can use to create value for your business through writing social media posting & captioning instead of being a post to scroll past.
Tip #1: Know Your Audience
Like you wouldn’t write a wedding speech the same way you’d write a commencement speech, writing social media captions requires you to understand your intended audience and write for them. What is your audience interested in? Many social media platforms such as LinkedIn have analytics tools that are great for gaining insight into what types of people follow you, engage with your content, and what their interests are. Catering to these interests helps you to gain engagement with current followers and gain new, similar people.
Tip #2: Get Your Formatting Right
Like knowing your audience, you want to know what format garners the most engagement. Let’s say you have just launched a new product and are now working on improving brand awareness to garner more recognition and sales for your product. One appropriate format for this post would be a video showing a product demo, or an attractive promotional video of the product. Posting a static image in this scenario probably would not be as informative or exciting as a video.
Researching which types of post formats work best for your desired business goal is an important part of creating a successful social media post.
Tip #3: Length
The caption length can make or break a post depending on the intended audience. There is no black and white criterion for determining which types of audiences prefer short or long captions, so oftentimes this means that you will need to experiment with caption length to determine what length performs best for you.
Coming up with unique, clever, and catchy short captions can be a great way to show off a brand’s persona, but a short caption should still stay true to the message you want to communicate to your audience. On the flip side, a long caption can be great for storytelling and informational purposes, but writing too long of a caption could risk no one reading it- and we don’t want that! The goal with caption length is to experiment to find what works for you, and then stick with it.
Tip #4: CTA’s (Call to Action’s)
When writing social media captions for business, stating a call to action is imperative. A call to action provides direction to your reader of what to do once they have viewed and read your post. For example, if you want viewers to view your website, a CTA in your caption would say something along the lines of “Click the website link in my bio to learn more!”. CTA’s like these is where the real value of social media comes full circle with your overall business goals.
Tip #5: Questions
Similarly to CTA’s, asking questions in your social media captions is a great way to enhance engagement and learn more about your audience. However, you never want to ask questions that do not pose a purpose to your overall business goals. For example, the question “What is your favorite ice cream flavor?” would be a great question to ask as an ice-cream parlor owner looking to change up his product offerings.
If this question was asked in a different scenario, such as an apartment building event planner posting photos from an ice-cream truck event, it would not make sense. A more appropriate question that would create useful information for the apartment event planner would be “This event was delicious! Residents, which types of events would you like to attend next?”
Tip #6: Hashtags
Hashtags can be a great way to increase engagement and visibility of your social media posts. There is much debate about what the appropriate number of hashtags there should be on your posts, but what is most important with hashtags is relevancy. Hashtags are meant to bring social media users with similar interests to the same content.
Keeping your hashtags relevant to your content are more likely to bring the right audience to your page. Using ultra-popular, yet irrelevant hashtags risks bringing lots of the wrong people to your page.
Tip #7: Emojis
Like everything we have discussed thus far, emoji use requires experimentation with your audience. Not all businesses are in an industry where emojis are appropriate to use, and using the wrong emojis can create negative attention. Generally, using 1-2 emojis is appropriate, but you should use your best judgement in deciding which emojis to use and if you should use them at all.
Tip #8: Simplicity
Beyond all else, simplicity is key on social media. Your audience is probably scrolling along, seeing tons of content within just a few minutes. Keeping your caption and content simple and easy to process means you are less likely to be ignored and more likely to be understood. Better yet, your page or website is more likely to be visited!
Attention spans on social media are minute, so it is your job when creating content to garner attention as quickly as possible, and this means attractive and clear messaging. With captioning, you want to get your main message across in a clear and concise manner, often stating your CTA in the first sentence.
Conclusion:
Social media is a busy space to be, but these tips can help make your content stand out and thrive. Here at Oak Creative, we take these tips and add our additional expert knowledge and skill in strategy, content creation, design, and management. We are skilled listeners here to identify pain points and opportunities that can get people pumped for your brand!