Writing captions on Instagram, what does text mean in a visual network?

A question has arisen that may involve surprise, anger and resignation from many Community Managers. But the melon is there and it’s time to open it, so here we go.

Does anyone care about captions on Instagram?

Let’s not beat around the bush: we do not know. But neither us nor anyone (unless you have a tool to measure it, in which case Let’s see when you show it to us!).

The importance of texts on Instagram is a fairly subjective topic and depends on a multitude of factors, but we have taken the trouble to compile you some certainties there are about it. This way we can draw conclusions together about whether The time you spend writing texts for this social network would be better spent on karaoke… o no.

Instagram is a visual network

This truism is the basis from which we must start: Instagram was conceived and is used by its users as a visual social network. Therefore, since we spend much less time looking at an image than reading a text, Content consumption is going at a stratospheric speed on this network. And if not, tell it to the videos, which were the great future of Instagram and yet still have lower engagement data than the photos.

The text is a complement to the image, which puts it in context or develops the message it wants to convey. But we have become such a visual society that even We have inserted the images into the text. Something like that ➡️😏🖕📝.

Emojis are already present in 57% of Instagram profiles

Quintly

Have you not already seen some photos that only have a couple of emojis as their titles? The invasion has begun: tremble, texts.

Captions on Instagram matter… half

The average user is not as skeptical as those who are sick of digital marketing: in their own profile He still gives a lot of importance to the texts I writeand. All you have to do is check the keyword “Instagram Caption” in Google Trends: the popularity of this search has not stopped growing in the last three years, and the results are full of articles with “creative” ideas to title our photos.

Who knows, maybe personal copywriter be the profession of the future…

But, on the other side of the coin, we are the brands. That our audience gives importance to their own texts It doesn’t mean that you value (or even read) ours.

On the one hand, the logic of Instagram tells us that in the face of such rapid consumption our texts should be very concise. But, on the other hand, the algorithm will reward us if the user spends more time on our post (and, if we make them read more, it will be time that we will retain them).

On the Internet you can find a multitude of posts that claim to have «the perfect length for Instagram texts«. However, no one supports it with real data. And, while National Geographic claims it with long explanatory paragraphs, Beyoncé does not put a single letter in her titles and continues to break the internet every time she publishes.