I get asked a lot--as I’m sure most marketers and social media managers are--whether short captions are better than long ones. My answer is to use a mix of both, but whether that mix is weighted toward longer or shorter captions should be based on your audience. Knowing when and how to use caption variations can be confusing though. Here’s my strategy to create a good balance between the two and ensure you’ll get the engagement or conversion you want.
Apply elements of the journalist standards of “newsworthiness” to your posts. Ask yourself, is this relevant, is it timely, why am I posting this, and does it provide value? Knowing your audience can answer these questions and guide what and how you write captions. Take the below post on Kennebec Valley’s tourism page, for example. The video is of a moose sighting which is quite exciting for visitors (relevant), summer is Maine’s peak tourism season, and when most people get to see moose (timely), it demonstrates the opportunity to see wildlife when visiting Maine (why), and it shows those who have never seen a moose before what they can expect (value).
Keep short captions short and long captions long. It might just be my own experience, but I’ve found that middle-of-the-road captions perform worse than one or the other. I suspect people read short captions because they’re easy, long captions because they believe it will be interesting, but they don’t think there’s value in captions they perceive only brush the surface.
My general rule is short captions should be 1-3 sentences, and long captions should be about 2 paragraphs or around 250 words (the length of the previous three paragraphs combined).
Lead up to your long captions. An excellent way to get people to read longer captions is to build up to them, tease your audience for upcoming product releases, important news, or a “storytime.” Whatever it is, you can groom your audience to be on the lookout for your next post, and sometimes, they’ll even seek it out if it hasn’t landed on their feed. People are smarter consumers than businesses give them credit for; they know when they engage they are actively telling the platform they’re interested in your content and want more, so teasing them is a good way to foster that.
You don’t have to be a professional writer to make good captions (you can always hire me if you need help--hehe), but following these easy best practices can make you sound like one. It’s even likely that you and your audience are similar and all you have to do is ask yourself, what would I like to see and read?
Let me know if you have questions or would like me to cover a specific topic in the comments below!
