Simple tricks to improve your captioning
November 18, 2020
Getting more engagement on social media can help your business significantly with expanding your digital reach. However, you can’t expect to get conversion from your posts, if you aren’t writing effective captions.
This guide will help you with the basic elements in every effective caption, which will greatly help you get more value out of your social media marketing & investment. Just like other digital marketing activities, there’s an incredible amount of value available to those who take the time to do their marketing properly, carefully, and creatively.
Use a consistent, appropriate voice
The most fundamental part of social media captioning, is using a consistent voice that aligns with your brand & audiences. To do this, start with determining the tone of your brand, is it friendly? Is it stoic? Is it formal? So long as your messaging adheres to the standards you’ve set, you’ll increase the likelihood of your captions resonating with certain audiences.
With your tone, look at the vocabulary you’re using on social media. How sophisticated is the terminology? Does it align with the audiences you’re hoping to reach? Adjusting your vocabulary to include the words and terms your audiences search, use, and think about is key to making your captions more engaging.
Take a moment to think from the perspective of your audience. What types of posts are they looking for? Who are they engaging with? Carefully evaluate the pros and cons with any decision regarding your brand’s voice on social media, and ensure whatever you choose is done consistently.
Make it actionable
In order for your captions to be engaging, you need to give your audience something they can engage with. Providing a link, survey, and or a call to action will give your audience an action-prompt to engage with. Without something like this in your caption, your audience won’t know how you want them to engage with your business online.
Not every caption needs to be engaging, as you don’t want to overwhelm your audiences with requests. To keep your social media posts engaging, without overwhelming your audiences, you can include questions to get them replying & commenting on your posts. Ask your audience what they think of an issue they encounter regularly (that you can solve for them), or what they think about a trend, or even a product of yours.
Ultimately, how you engage with your audiences depends on their social media behaviours, so you’ll need to be monitoring how they engage with different types of action-prompts. By continually monitoring this engagement, you can tailor a more personalized experience to your audiences, making it easier for you to use social media to get feedback, leads, reviews, and more.
Provide a reason to come back
Nearly every person and business has at least one social media account that they use somewhat frequently. You’ll need to give your audiences a reason to spend time reading & engaging with your posts, that your competitors and other channels can’t offer. By incentivizing your audiences to keep coming back to your channels, you will have an easier time using social media to get certain types of engagements over time.
The incentives you give your audiences depends on your business and your competitors. Most businesses will provide a promotional incentive through raffles, gifts, and discounts. Typically, the flow involves a specific form of engagement from a user, providing them with a reward for their engagement.
Not only do you want your audiences coming back, but you want them to engage with and talk about your business. By creating an inviting, rewarding online experience, you’ll increase the likelihood of users telling their friends and colleagues about their positive experience with your business.
Measuring the value
If you’ve started adjusting your captions to include the advice in this article, you’ll almost certainly see more engagement. However, the value of this engagement depends on what your business is seeking to gain from social media through conversions. Without properly defining the value you hope to get, you’ll find it difficult to know if you’re actually getting more out of social media than you’re putting in.
Many businesses will use analytical tools to determine if certain posts perform better than others, and if the action-prompt from their captions actually results in a transaction that would have otherwise not occurred. These types of digital marketing analytical approaches require you to have an up-to-date understanding on how to track, measure, and summarize your audiences’ engagements with your online presence.
If you’re not currently using a digital marketing strategy you’ve formalized for your business, but you’re still using social media - it’s time to take a step back. Ensure your business is spending it’s resources as effectively as possible through a formalized digital marketing strategy. This will help ensure you get more out of your social media investment than what you put in.
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