Three Tips For Writing Bomb Insta Captions

We are all guilty of writing cliche instagram captions. I do it all the time. It’s hard when you’re trying to think of something visually creative to post, you often have no energy left over for the caption so you result to writing something like “mood” or “Last night’s sunset was 🔥”. 

But, that caption space is valuable real estate to help your followers fall a little bit more in love with your brand. 

Here are 3 tips for writing awesome instagram captions that resonate:

Establish a Tone/Voice

How do you establish a tone in writing? It’s hard to explain but you know when you see a brand that does it well. If you want to be bubbly and lively, you can establish a tone easily with emojis and punctuation. 

It’s funny but sometimes now on a text thread if someone doesn’t respond with an exclamation point or emoji we often think they are not being genuine, i.e. when someone says “Bye” vs “K bye! Can’t wait to see you then!” Those are two different tones (But also the first is usually someone of an older generation using proper grammar, am I right? You all know what I’m talking about, right?)

If you want to be humorous be quick and punchy and to the point. 

Barstool sports does a great job at this. Their captions are  always short and punchy and just adds an extra layer of hilarity to the post they are sharing already, even if, at times, their posts come off as “asshole-y” - they do it well.  

If you want to be serious and sentimental, you can do that as well, but you would probably want to opt out of using so many exclamation points and emojis. 

Match your caption to your image - or don’t! 

Make sure your tone and caption match the tone of the image. If it’s a serious photo for example, unless you’re making fun of it in some way, you’ll want the caption to be serious as well. 

If it’s a hilarious cat video, maybe don’t talk about how you’re taking a break from social media for your mental health (while it’s not a bad idea to share things like that - see point #3- that doesn’t necessarily line up and people might miss the point.) 

You can also get creative though by purposefully mismatching this. 

Andrew J How - Andrew Howard-Interior Design- does a hilarious job of this. He obviously post photos of beautiful interiors he designs, but instead of blatantly describing what’s in the picture, he first writes something hilarious that his kids did.

Be Authentic & Genuine

My  marketing rule of thumb for well, everything. You’ll hear me say this time and time again but it’s super important. People will connect with you on a deeper level and become brand ambassadors if they feel they truly connect with you. People don’t connect with corporate talk.  They connect with people being honest and relatable - sometimes that even means being open and vulnerable. You WILL have people who won’t like that, but those are your people. 

Chrissy Teigen recently did a beautifully heartbreaking job with this when she shared her post about her miscarriage. (We love you, Chrissy!)

Instagram captions can be tricky, but it’s valuable real estate to market your brand and business, so don’t waste it! Break the habit of writing cliche or boring captions and think hard on how you can use that real estate to help tell expand upon the images to tell your story.